Tidal’s niche in music streaming has always been it’s high quality music offerings, and their music is now the highest quality around as they integrate Master Quality Audio (MQA) music.

Tidal revealed in December last year that they would be bringing MQA music to their platform. The audio format, which retains the quality of a studio recording without excessive file sizes, is now being used on it’s first ever music streaming service – Jay-Z’s Tidal.

Since Jay-Z launched the service from WiMP to his own Tidal the company has prioritised high quality music by offering two tiers; one at the usual price with all you’d expect from a streaming service, and a $19.99 monthly tier that offers High Fidelity music streaming. With MQA Tidal are now the first streamers to offer the new, uncompressed audio format for music, though for now the available tracks in MQA may be limited we should be seeing plenty of additions.

Working with the creators of MQA, Meridian, Tidal will offer MQA tracks on their ‘HiFi’ tier and will only be available on desktop, as mobiles and tablets may not be able to handle outputting the quality. Tracks that can be listened to in MQA will be tagged with “Master” so users can easily find the best quality music and try the new format out.

Tidal MQA music streaming hifi definition quality

It was announced that Tidal had added MQA audio to their streaming service at the CES technology show in Las Vegas. MQA was announced by Meridian in December 2014 and has since been partnering up with companies and services to help make the new HiFi audio format possible for listening on speakers and via streaming. Last May Warner Music Group signed a deal that made them the first major label to provide new music in MQA, hoping to “significantly increase music fans’ access to hi-resolution music globally”.

Now that Tidal have partnered up with Meridian to offer Master Quality Audio we may see other streaming services start to take interest in the new audio format. Tidal have always been the leaders in high quality music streaming, though perhaps not leaders in anything else, however as MQA is quickly spreading throughout the industry as the potential future for audio formats that deliver high quality, uncompressed music in a size that doesn’t cripple your internet.

MQA CEO, Mike Jbara said: “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.”