I was at the presentation yesterday. It will take me several posts to get through everything. I will start with the comments from Pal at Tidal.

Pal was a good representative from Tidal and well spoken. He spoke roughly a third of the hour seminar. Tidal is working on adding vendors to their platform, they had just added Naim. Pal indicated they had 600,000 subscriptions to Tidal. 45% of those subscriptions are for the lossless service, which Tidal is pleased with. Tidal is now up to 35 million tracks.

It was obvious that Pal was a huge fan of MQA. Pal and Bob shared a number of stories together. You could tell they had collaborated on a number of occasions. In an answer to a question at the end, Pal indicated Tidal plans to stream music higher than 16/44 only by using MQA.

There was no definitive date given on when Tidal will start streaming high res MQA. The holdup is the studios. More on that when I post about Bob's MQA presentation. At the end of seminar, I asked Pal for more details. He indicated there will likely be a new pricing tier for high res MQA streaming. The studios are all over the place on when they will release MQA titles and what they will price MQA at, he indicated. This makes it extra hard for Tidal to price out an MQA tier. Pal guessed that it will be CES in January before they are ready to announce MQA high res streaming.

mw