It's been two years – almost to the day – since our favourite music streaming service launched Tidal Masters: hi-res MQA streams, available at no extra cost to subscribers of its £20 per month HiFi package. At the time it was the first streaming service to offer better-than-CD-quality streams, although Qobuz has since reached equal footing.
Tidal Masters has only been available via the service's desktop app and through direct hardware integration on select MQA-ready products (such as the Bluesound Node 2 streamer). Until now, that is.
It's a good day for Tidal HiFi subscribers with an Android smartphone, as Tidal has announced that Masters streams are now available on all Android smartphones.
Before now, only handsets with built-in MQA support (like some LG and Essential models) could access Masters. Android users can also listen to downloaded Masters offline, too.
You'll simply need to download the latest version of the Tidal app, which has the MQA Core Decoder needed to 'unfold' the MQA streams and output it at 88.2kHz or 96kHz.
MQA CEO Mike Jbara said: “We know that most music fans are choosing to stream on their phones. MQA’s view is that you should have the best quality sound regardless of where you’re listening. We’re delighted that, through our ongoing collaboration with TIDAL, access to master quality audio is now expanding across mobile.”
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