Tidal announced that its studio quality ‘Master’ audio to all Android devices running Android 5.0 and above.
Two years ago at CES, the company announced that Master quality audio was coming to the desktop app. It followed that up with Master audio on the Essential Phone and the LG V30.
To enable this audio quality on all Android devices, Tidal has added an MQA decoder to the app. MQA is a lossless high-quality audio format that claims to capture all of the sound frequencies, compared to the 10 percent MP3 captures.
Only Tidal Hi-Fi subscribers can take advantage of the premium sound quality. Additionally, just select albums and songs are available in the file format.
Notable examples include Beyonce’s Lemonade, Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, Television’s Marquee Moon and more. Tidal offers over 165,000 tracks in the MQA format.
To hear the differences in this sound quality, users will want to listen with the best headphones or speakers they can.
iOS users shouldn’t be too worried, because the update is coming to Apple’s devices soon, according to Tidal.
Tidal has been one of the less popular music streaming services for a while, even though it has been adding new features like Android Auto and Fire TV support as well as working with the online file locker Plex.
Tidal may offer the best audio quality and pay artists the most per stream, but it has to do more for its non-Hi-fi users if it wants to pull people away from Apple, Google or Spotify’s music streaming ecosystems.
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