End of an era: Tidal to drop last remaining MQA tracks

So much for MQA on Tidal, with the music streaming service announcing that it will soon wipe any remaining MQA-encoded tracks from its catalog of tunes. 

Also going out with the bathwater are tracks that employ Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format for spatial audio, Tidal says. 

The news comes a little less than a year after Tidal declared the open-source FLAC codec would become its “preferred” format for high-resolution audio, a move that effectively knocked MQA off its perch as far as Tidal was concerned. 

This news story is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best music streaming services.

Tidal has been gradually phasing out the proprietary and controversial MQA format over the past year, leaving many to wonder when the Square-owned music streamer would finally leave MQA behind for good.  

Well, the date has been set, with Tidal now saying that on July 24, any MQA tracks in its subscribers’ libraries or playlists will be automatically replaced by the “highest quality FLAC version” available to Tidal. 

That leaves open the possibility that some soon-to-be-yanked MQA songs on Tidal will—for the time being, at least—be replaced by lower-quality FLAC tracks. 

For its part, Tidal says that it has “at least” 16-bit/44.1kHz (or CD-quality) FLAC tracks for “nearly all” of its current MQA tracks. High-resolution music tracks can go all the way up to 24-bit/192kHz.  

“We are working hard to ensure all existing MQA tracks will be replaced with a FLAC version in a timely manner,” according to a Tidal support page. 

In the meantime, Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format for spatial audio will disappear from Tidal on the same day that MQA tracks get zapped, leaving Dolby Atmos as the spatial format “we will support going forward.” 

Tidal first partnered up with Dolby in 2020, and it had offered spatial audio tracks in both Dolby Atmos and Sony’s competing 360 Reality Audio format until now. 

Short for Master Quality Authenticated, MQA (as noted by our Tidal reviewer James Barber) is a format that can pack high-resolution audio into small file sizes.

But MQA has a couple of key downsides, starting with the fact that it’s a proprietary format, meaning those who use MQA must pay a royalty for the privilege.

Also, MQA files are lossy, not lossless, a serious point of contention for die-hard audiophiles who demand “bit-perfect” playback.

Just like MQA, the FLAC codec can compress high-resolution audio at resolutions up to 24-bit/192kHz. But while FLAC files are typically quite a bit larger than equivalent MQA files, they’re lossless rather than lossy. Even better, FLAC is an open-source format.

Tidal’s abandonment of MQA leaves the format down but not quite out. 

MQA’s new parent, Canada-based Lenbrook, recently announced that it’s teaming up with HDtracks, a digital storefront for high-resolution tunes, on a new music streaming service that will offer both FLAC and MQA tracks. 

The still-unnamed music service will also boast a new MQA-developed wireless codec that can transmit lossless audio via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and UWB, similar to Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless codec.