How much is MQA conversion?

The licensing agreements between the resellers (Tidal) and those who own the rights to the copyrighted material tend to be private. One thing is certain, however, you can be sure that once a full implementation of the sound "degrading system" MQA represents is in place, the cost of the "family jewels" or "authentic" version will go up. That is essentially the complete rationale for the entire MQA exercise - produce various grades of sound quality from the original master file (typically 192khz/24 bit digital encoding format) and sell the highest quality to the highest bidder. Those who don't want to pay the cost of special licensed MQA players and the price for premium streaming services can still get the recording for less cost in what amounts to an MP3 format.

Wouldn’t Tidal offer standard 16/44 FLAC files as an alternative to MQA?

Tidal does offer different resolutions for the same album in some of the more popular recordings. You kind of have to dig around, though.
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