Is TIDAL actually lossless? - STILL using MQA?

Is TIDAL actually streaming lossless quality music? Or is there still MQA hiding in plain sight?

How to read the new measurements:

The 10 stages of headphone measurements

0:00 - Intro
0:10 - MQA History
2:45 - Is TIDAL still using MQA?
6:12 - Changes at TIDAL
7:07 - Contacting TIDAL
8:33 - Conclusion

[DarkFire]

"We are working hard to..." Ah, the standard utterly meaningless 'corporate' response. Do better Tidal. Thanks for highlighting this issue, good video.

[melchior-chr.v.brincken]

Thanks for killing the MQA scam! (they are mostly mastered with LOUDNESS WAR mastering, so even if it was not a scam in the first place, it would no make things better)

[jamescruz]

I hope you guys never let off the pressure from companies who support the kind of greed and malice MQA did. Too many in the tech space are too tolerant of the greedy bullshit companies pull over them. The audiophile community is one of the rare few who can actually vote with their wallet and make a tangible difference within a relatively short period of time because of how niche the space is. Keep up the good fight.

[JustinHEMI]

This video earned a subscriber. I love consumer advocacy and that you're working to hold companies accountable.

I'm going to stick with Tidal a while to see how this plays out, and look forward to your next update.

[lec_R]

"Mqa went bankrupt"
Holy fucqk, that fills my heart with joy

[yoonalim]

Experienced this a few days ago, a list was playing and I noticed some songs had lesser quality. Checked it after a while and then saw the MQA mark. I thought they were still cleaning up their old MQA files. Thanks for your video!

[Currawong]

Good work as usual. I tried TIDAL again earlier this year, as the sometimes have music I like that isn't on Qobuz. Unfortunately I ran into what you describe here, that a lot of their music still only has the MQA versions, often only 16/44.1, which, as we know, is only about 13-bit.

[rogerhuston]

I'll stay with Qobuz. I was a Tidal user for 6 years, until the MQA kerfuffle, but I left 2 years back.

[JK-qkkh]

Excellent, excellent content. This channel deserves way more subscriptions

[JC-njcs]

For some reason my favorite tracks on Tidal are mostly in FLAC. And the sound difference is minimal (if any) with TOTL headphones.

[adamogiliev]

Tidal CEO left, their parent company are making redundancies across engineering and management roles, according to some sources they are focusing on other revenue streams and scaling back investment in the streaming platform.

[En_Joshi-Godrez]

The best thing about tidal is their inability to currency convert. If you know, you know.

[rogerhuston]

What? Tidal didn't respond? Shocking!

[PEM-ztrd]

Videos like this are extremely important for consumers and keeps the services on their toes. A genuine thanks for this !

[ShaneCutting]

Excellent work! The Nyan Cat bit was hysterical!

[jos]

I totally agree, thanks for explaining!

[jakeross]

Thanks so much for the great work you do! So much audio journalism seems like little more than advertising. Great to see real investigative journalism in the audio field

[Nemura]

I have noticed that some tracks sound like grap and others very good, that's life boys and its perfect.

[retrogemcollector]

This is exactly why I cancelled my Tidal in favor of Qobuz (despite the later's UI being inferior) because my Zen Dac was picking up these hidden MQA's. I'll go back when they are honest.

[mkx]

I have seen that too. Tidal clearly has a few API keys one can access the service through. Depending on what API key one is using, different track quality and format can show as the highest there is to get. I have seen that while I could get a 24/96 file from the Tidal app, another one just got 24/48 or 16/48, and not seldom MQA. Last time I have seen though that things changed, and even an API key I used previously that gave me sub-par results, returned a higher resoluted FLAC file without MQA. So I think Tidal is working on it, but it appears to take time... not that surprising.