Tidal’s high-fidelity ‘Masters’ audio mode lands on iOS apps

Tidal may be a distant competitor to Apple Music and Spotify, but much like Neil Young's PonoMusic, Tidal is keeping its high-fidelity music service going far past its expected expiration date.

Tidal's most premium-est audio vision, Tidal Masters, gives your tunes a studio-quality kick (typically 96 kHz / 24 bit), a substantial bump beyond what its HiFi streaming delivers. The "Master Quality" audio first came to the ill-fated Essential Phone, then Tidal rolled out the feature to Android phones this past January, and it's now available on iOS devices as of today.

Tidal pitches the extra high-end mode for song quality as "exactly as the artist intended it to sound."

It's not going to change how you listen to your entire library; in January, the company detailed that about 165,000 of the tracks had support for the high-end bitrate. Tidal says that you also must be a subscriber of Tidal HiFi, which sets you back $19.99 per month.