In a surprising turn of events last month, Tidal CEO Jesse Dorogusker announced in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit that the service would “soon” be adding lossless hi-res FLAC streams to its catalogue for HiFi Plus subscribers. These FLAC streams will sit alongside the tier’s current hi-res offering of MQA-powered streams that has given the service hi-res status since 2017 – long before Apple or Amazon joined the hi-res music streaming foray.
Yep, when mass-market streaming services were offering low-bitrate streams five years ago, Tidal decided to offer better quality – and to achieve that, it used (and licensed) MQA technology, a method of digitally packaging and storing studio master recordings as files small enough to stream. MQA side-stepped the issue of FLAC and other lossless formats requiring big file sizes that were hard to stream due to average bandwidth limitations at the time. As Dorogusker explained during the AMA, the MQA solution offered “a balance of quality and bandwidth” at a time when the two didn't massively go hand in hand. But now that bandwidth across networks has improved and streaming 24-bit FLAC is more viable (Amazon Music Unlimited now uses it for hi-res streaming, after all), that is no longer an obstacle to overcome. “Hi-res FLAC files will be big,” admitted Dorogusker, “but we think the infra is ready, even on mobile.”
