That used to be the case, but is unfortunately no longer so: The slate of Warner MQA albums added earlier this year come ONLY as MQA, not as regular 16/44. And what's worse, they are all 16/44 MQA.
I've always been a "moderate defender" of MQA, mostly because I think there IS a need for lower bandwidth and lower disk space HiRes options: Even to this day in USA, most mobile plans have limited data allotments. Economical ones absolutely do. And even Unlimited postpaid plans (which generally run $60/month) often have data caps. As pointed out, 24/96 FLAC files really are quite big, not to mention 24/192 ones.
Add to this that Qobuz and Amazon HD (the main HiRes alternatives to Tidal) send everything through the Mixer on LG Quad DAC phones. At least Tidal used to play MQA files (24-bit ones) in full quality on these phones. And on MQA USB DACs too, as long as volume is set to max. (Until Tidal has fixed the current bug, version 2.21.0 can be installed from apkmirror.)
As far as quality / size ratio goes, I don't believe anything comes even close to MQA. And well recorded, well mastered MQA releases really do sound great. Anybody who claims that MQA sounds horrible and that the MQA filter completely destroys the music (and some people really do hate MQA and really do claim that) are not being honest. Just check some of the free 2L and David Elias downloads and tell me they sound horrible.
That said, I also believe that the argument of MQA being a marketing gimmick is absolutely true. The media industry always loved new formats that let them sell old wine on new bottles to the same customers one more time. Among the MQA releases on Tidal only few reach the SQ level of those 2L and David Elias tracks. And many are just bad re-released of poor recordings.
And these Warner 16/44 MQAs make me seriously consider changing my stance on MQA, particularly considering they don't have non-MQA alternatives: I used to be able to say that most MQA tracks were 24-bit, so the loss of resolution wasn't a big issue (MQA uses the lowest order bits to store its origami). But with 16-bit that loss of resolution is significant, and I would expect it to affect SQ in some cases. I assume when using HiFi mode (as opposed to Master mode) the MQA is simply stripped, but the lost bits are still lost.
So the dire picture that MQA haters have been painting all along suddenly comes a little closer to reality.
(Oh, and BTW I don't like the MQA filter either when applied to plain RedBook tracks, as UAPP does.)
That said, there are some great MQA experiences in Tidal. In the classical genre I have previously mentioned the catalog of Everest Records 3-channel recordings on 35mm film tape from the 1950s and 60s, such as
this recording of Copland's 3rd Symphony, directed by the composer himself. These albums are $40 a pop on HDtracks. And among the Warner albums, some are great for other reasons than audio quality, such as
this classic recording of Dvorak's cello concerto (arguably history's greatest) with cellist Jacqueline du Pre (arguably history's greatest) conducted by her husband Daniel Barenboim (pretty great too).
