Tidal flac is now a reality for hi-res streaming. With the demise of MQA this was inevitable and I for one couldn’t be happier. I have never been convinced by MQA. I could see the point of it if bandwidth was an issue but it isn’t so all I and many others have wanted from Tidal is hi-res flac. Neither of my external Dacs are MQA compliant that’s how much I deemed MQA a necessity. So here’s the burning question Can I hear a difference? I played the latest offering from Terrace Martin this morning through headphones and it sounded sublime at 24bit/64k but it’s early days yet and I need to do a lot more listening before I finally nail my colours. Why you may ask haven’t I simply switched to Amazon or Qobuz instead of waiting for Tidal to see sense and ditch MQA? Well firstly they haven’t exactly ditched it. It’s still available as they add hi-res flac alongside it. I believe they currently have an offering of six million songs in hi-res flac with more being added all the while to the current catalogue of over 100 million tracks. Secondly I just prefer the UI of » Continue Reading.