So, to confirm:
MAX means anything higher than 44.1/16. New high bitrate tracks are being loaded as FLACs and companies appear to be uploading the same bitrates to Tidal and Qobuz. A lot of albums are showing only as HIGH where they might otherwise have been MQA converted previously.
Most older tracks showing as MAX are still MQA, but some albums have been changed to FLAC already - see the Pink Floyd catalogue as noted above, which is now all FLAC at different bitrates.
Where this all goes wrong, is if you have a DAC that runs MQA but cannot cope with bitrates higher than 96/24: the result with a 192/24 track is bad.
That affects the Audioquest Dragonfly I'm testing with (a lot of those have been sold to people explicitly wanting Tidal MQA), the old Meridian Explorer DAC,and if I remember correctly, there was a NAD multiroom DAC with this spec. There will probably be others.
Qobuz has an option to play tracks at a maximum 24/96 for a limited DAC or bandwidth, and indication of what bitrate you are getting (though it doesn't indicate the few MQA albums in their catalogue). It seems that Tidal will need to implement such a system fairly quickly or customers with DACs that use MQA but a limited PCM bitrate are going to complain, as well as anyone who has bought into MQA based on the claims made.
Tidal are going to have to give users information about and control over what they are actually playing, or they will just antagonise those customers who didn't desert because of MQA. I can't see people racing back there in droves because it is now the same as Apple Music and Qobuz in quality terms, and I can see people with the limited DACs leaving for services that they can still use at "high resolution"... though it may hardly matter in practice.
