Also removing MQA from CD-quality hifi tier…
https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/14m6j5o/hires_flac_is_almost_here/
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I didn’t see any mention of MQA in Tidal’s post, where did you read that?
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[skbubba]
What about the cd quality hi-fi tier? Will it be native 16/44.1 redbook flac with no mqa?
Reply
TIDAL_Anders
Hello! I’m Anders and I work on the Product team at TIDAL.
Thank you for that question! Eventually yes. We’re working through the catalogue as we get new and old content refreshed with FLAC as the source file
Thanks for the pointer, I had searched for MQA but I needed to click the + icon before that reply was visible / searchable.
It will be interesting to see, if this will have consequences for their pricing policy.
Torben
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I would be extremely surprised if Tidal raise their price again, they are already double the price of the competition.
Wonder how much longer MQA will be around. However, I believe ATMOS is here to stay.
–MD
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I wonder if the poor users will have to relink each and every track in their playlists when a good portion of the catalog gets changed to FLAC… this would really be annoying…
glad I decided for qobuz instead ;o)
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They also offer ATMOS which there are quite a few users when it comes to Home Theater setups.
On my Home Theater I find that ATMOS on Tidal sounds better than MQA.
–MD
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As does Apple, at half the price.
Amazon too as I understand.
Atmos is a very cool feature but it’s not enough to justify double the price of the competition, especially given then integration Apple & Amazon enjoy in other software / products. They both have much better library coverage too.
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I bet you will have to as they will have different ids. Had to when they replaced regular flac for MQA so can’t see this being any different.
Funny going back to its origins, I subscribed when it first launched and MQA was not a thing on the platform but flac certainly was as it’s the reason I chose it.
No, not necessarily. On Tidal, many 16 bit 44.1 kHz (and possibly other) MQA albums that replaced their FLAC original uploads did not change whatever Tidal uses to identify them for licensing purposes. If you had any of those albums in your Roon library, they surreptitiously went from bog standard FLAC to MQA without any user intervention. The same thing could happen in reverse, going from MQA back to plain FLAC while remaining in your Roon library.
AJ
I wish Roon worked with Amazon unlimited. It gives the best bang for your buck if you buy the yearly subscription and you get both 44.1 lossless and Atmos for roughly 7.50 a month on the yearly plan if your a prime member.
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That was not my experience, I had to replace a lot of them.
Will be interesting to see if this impacts Qobuz subs moving forward.
I started off with Wimp before it became Tidal but switched to Qobuz for Roon use when Tidal started with MQA.
Currently have Qobuz and Tidal (non masters) as got a discount on a Tidal sub. Tidal much better for offline content stability on the DAP than Qobuz.
Will see how both their pricing plans pan out when the dust settles.
When Wimp first came out in Norway it was free with your cable TV sub for long time, then went to 50 NOK / 5 GBP per month pre Tidal.
It’s a draw but as I buy my music and only use streaming for discovery now Sublime is better value as I get discounts and regular sales. I ditched all my favourites as Roon makes a sows ear of it all anyway with amount being removed from Qobuz and it slows it down too much.
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Tidal just announced a price increase from CHF 12.95 to 13.90 for HiFi (CD) quality per 1st August in Switzerland.
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I asked Tidal if we would have to manually replace our Roon library MQA linked albums with flac links and this is the response I got:
As far as playlist, I keep three copies of all playlist including local, Qobuz, and Tidal. I use Soundiiz for this. It would be a simple task, to replace the Tidal MQA playlist with Tidal flac playlist using Soundiiz. Just delete the MQA playlist and send the local or Qobuz playlist to Tidal and re-import into Roon.
EDIT: Maybe not so simple if you don’t also have a Qobuz account. I create all my playlist using Qobuz links then save a local copy and also export to Tidal. I never mix both Tidal and Qobuz links in any playlist I create.
EDIT: I will miss MQA. I liked the smaller files when using cellular.
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as an MQA stan, this will likely mean I consolidate to one streaming services. Qobuz and Tidal are essentially the same, some nominal differences in catalog (and not always where you might expect). MQA was my primary reason for subscribing to Tidal in the first place.
/sad
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