Until now, ‘high-resolution’ music has been an audiophile niche for the most part, and mainly focused on downloads rather than streaming.
Tidal made higher-quality streams part of its offering from the start – indeed, from the pre-Jay Z days when it was a Scandinavian service called WiMP – and now it has become the first streaming service to roll out the new MQA hi-res format.
The news broke this afternoon amid the CES technology show in Las Vegas, where high-resolution music is making quite a splash thanks to a prominent stand backed by all three major labels and various hardware manufacturers.
For now, the MQA tracks will only be available to subscribers of Tidal’s $19.99-a-month ‘HiFi’ tier, and only within the desktop version of the service rather than its mobile app or through other devices. It’s being promoted within the service with the tag ‘Master’.
“Tidal is delivering master-quality audio recordings directly from the source to HiFi members — an audio experience exactly as the artist intended — in partnership with MQA,” is how the service explains the new feature to its users.
Tidal is claiming a catalogue of “thousands” of master-quality albums. Classic back-catalogue recordings loom large, as you’d expect, but there are also recent albums like Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’, Bruno Mars’ ‘Unorthodox Jukebox’ and Coldplay’s ‘A Head Full of Dreams’. Beyoncé and Coldplay are among Tidal’s co-owners.
The deal is an important milestone for MQA, whose technology was developed by hardware firm Meridian Audio.
The format is already supported by a growing number of home-audio devices as well as B2B digital-music firm 7digital’s download stores. Tidal is the first mainstream streaming service to use MQA however.
“Tidal is an artist-centric music company. We could not be more excited that they share our vision of having fans hear the authentic performance of their favourite music,” said MQA CEO Mike Jbara in a statement.
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