Tidal makes listening to MQA music tracks available for iOS

Tidal has released a new version of its music app for the iOS operating system. This allows users to listen to so-called MQA streams, which should guarantee a relatively high sound quality.

Version 2.7 is now available on Apple’s App Store, which Tidal says will allow HiFi users to listen to more than 150,000 audio tracks that would sound just as good as studio quality in terms of audio quality.

These are so-called MQA files, which stands for Master Quality Authenticated, the name of the audio codec and the company of the same name behind it. Previously, a special decoder was needed to use MQA. Such a decoder is for example in the LG V30, but that is no longer necessary, since there is a software decoder in the Tidal app.

According to Tidal, MQA is a technology to compress digital music without limitations, giving listeners a music experience as the artist intended. It allows the app to stream high-quality audio in a lossless audio container, such as flac or wav; this usually concerns 96kHz/24bit, without the need for an enormous bandwidth.

Such master quality audio has been available to Android users since January, with this functionality also limited to HiFi premium users. This option became available to Tidal PC users in January 2017.