Compressing flac files again for use with a cpu the first unfold, need a cheap chip to go further, is never going to be real. Tidal isn't proving they have the original higher res files on their drives in the first place. Even if such a bandwidth saving chip existed, (no story why they say you need the chip to go higher than 96), we would still be paying double even without them having to use more. You can't improve the format when you compress it. Of course they'll choose the name Master Quality Authenticated. It sounds the opposite of what they're actually doing. My Queer Ambitions.
I'll pay $30/40 monthly for an uncompressed higher res wav stream with a good sounding default player, especially if Audirvana makes it work in theirs. But I'd rather they just make streaming players decompress the track to a temporary hard drive file, and then play that.