MQA Streaming with TIDAL Masters
MQA Streaming with TIDAL
At CES 2017, TIDAL announced a new feature for TIDAL HiFi subscribers called "TIDAL Masters" which offers MQA streaming with Tidal. Current HiFi members will have access to thousands of master-quality albums for superior sound exactly as the artists intended.
The TIDAL and MQA partnership plans to deliver an authenticated and unbroken version, typically 96 kHz / 24 bit, with the highest possible resolution. This will be available through the TIDAL desktop application and available on mobile and web applications in the future.
Aurender Music Players & Streaming
Currently, 
Aurender Music Servers and Players fully support the TIDAL streaming service. We recommend the Aurender A10 Music Server, Player & DAC as a high-performance digital-to-analog converter with 4TB of internal hard disk drive space and one 120GB solid-state drive cache for playback. Now, all TIDAL Masters streaming can deliver MQA quality sound from your Aurender device.
Master Quality Authenticated (MQA)
MQA, or Master Quality Authenticated, continues to partner with new companies and products to deliver the best audio resolution to stream or download. MQA removes the timing distortions and allows the listener to hear what happened in the recording studio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i69U69pqu0
MyTek's Brooklyn DAC is one of the first DACs to incorporate MQA as a reference USB2 DAC, line and phono analog preamplifier, and a reference headphone amplifier. Brooklyn also includes the MyTek Femtoclock Generator (tm) to maintain timing and accuracy for a smooth & rich sound.
"The Brooklyn DAC has been redesigned from the ground up. It offers superior sound, it's ready for upcoming hi-res MQA streaming (up to 384k), it plays all digital formats including DSD256, offers balanced headphone amp and both line and phono quality analog stages."
- Michal Jurewicz, E. E. Founder and President of Mytek Digital
MQA vs. DSD
Cookie Marenco, Founder and Producer at Blue Coast Records, reminds us... "DSD is a recording format. MQA is not. Those devoted to DSD recording are probably not soon going to give that up. DSD recording was available long before the downloads were available to consumers."
This highlights an important difference between these audio formats. DSD recording occurs during production as Producers like Cookie Marenco establish in order to deliver DSD256 files from the DSD256 master. It makes sense for Blue Coast Records to continue DSD recording since they have tailored their recording studio with the appropriate gear to support these formats and their Extended Sound Environment recording technique.
Indeed, MQA brings a lot of excitement to the Audiophile world. This new technology effectively converts analog music to digital and back to analog delivering master quality audio in files small enough to stream and download. We can hardly wait for more!
We look forward to your questions on the blog below. Let us know if you need help answering a question about MQA streaming with Tidal.
