TIDAL To Offer Hi-Res FLAC For HiFi Plus Subscribers
Image Credit: MQA & TIDAL
Its been less than a week since it was announced that MQA Ltd. was going into Administration, the British equivalent of US Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Currently TIDAL uses FLAC for its CD quality streams but uses MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoding to support its HiFi Plus subscribers.
It looks like TIDAL are going to “hedge their bets” with the future of MQA now standing in the balance. They announced on REDDIT on 4/11/2023 that HiFi Plus subscribers will soon have a new streaming option: high-resolution FLAC.
There is no press release available yet, but the news about TIDAL adopting high resolution FLAC is official. In an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on TIDAL by Jesse Dorogusker CEO, TIDAL + Bitcoin Hardware Lead at Block, @TIDAL_Jesse said:
“we will be introducing hi-res FLAC for our HiFi Plus subscribers soon. It’s lossless and an open standard. It’s a big file, but we’ll give you controls to dial this up and down based on what’s going on.” – from Reddit.com.
Here is the full comment:
Image Credit: Reddit
He didn’t actually say that TIDAL is removing MQA from its platform but reading between the lines it looks like it may only be a matter of time.
Dorogusker doesn’t say precisely when hi-res FLAC files will arrive, other than “soon”. However, he does indicate that provisions will be made for the larger file sizes to be able to dial the quality up or down depending upon the source in use.
For those not familiar with FLAC (Free Lossless Audio CODEC) it was first released in 2001 and provides significantly reduced file sizes without compromising audio quality. It is an open-source file format designed to provide lossless compression of digital audio data and its key features would include:
- Streaming Capability – HiRes files can be streamed over the Internet without the need for download
- Lossless Compression – retains all the original audio information, unlike the lossy compression of MP3 and AAC
- Compression Ratio: – depending upon the original uncompressed WAV or AIFF audio files, FLAC can compress them by up to 50%.
- Open Source – the source code is freely available publicly and can modified by developers to meet their needs
- Wide Compatibility – world wide support on many hardware and software platforms to include; smartphones, portable audio players and desktop applications
So now its just a waiting game to see where MQA, HiRes FLAC and TIDAL end up.
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