Tidal HIFI used to deliver (at least they claimed) CD quality audio. In the past Tidal 'master' tracks where FLAC (lossless) compressed 24bit/96kHz files. Then MQA came into the picture, MQA is a proprietary
format to (lossy) compress the additional samples into the LSB bits of the audio data. Although not many details ar known it boils down to the fact that e.g. that take 96Khz/17 bit audio, downsample this to 48kHz fs, then use the the lower 2 or 3 bits to store some (lossy) compressed data. This compressed data is used in the (MQA licensed) playback chain to 'recover' (which is in fact not possible) the original 96kHz fs. There is a lot of filtering an processing done with MQA, whther it sound better or worse is a matter of personal taste, but it is definately not tha master recording as the performer and the audio engineer intended it to be. Since MQA is proprietary, the process can only be done on licensed hardware and/or software. At this moment many of the Tidal tracks are being 'upgraded' to 'hi-res'. In fact, many of those 'hi-res' tracks are 44.1kHz 16 FLAC MQA encoded, which means the lower 3 bits contain noise if not processed by an MQA licenced DAC or decoder. This means you get worse than CD quality for a premium price when played back via an SB or one of the many existing receivers with Tiday support. For me the reason to cancel my Tidal subscription after many years. Besides the above, feaures like room correction, digital crossovers and digital volume control algorithims also will make things worse when applied to MQA encoded audio. MQA is nothing more than a lot of marketing fuzz to sell the same music again in another format. To introduce a new form of DRM and to make people buy new hardware. The fact that it's proprietary implies also the risk that you end up with something like Betamax or SACD for which you might not able to buy playback devices later. One of the many articles about MQA: https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/163302855-is-mqa-doa Brings me aslo to a question, it seems Qobuz is still delivering true CD quality, which might replace my Tidal subscription. Is Qobuz this supported by LMS ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ prutser's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=44996 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=113430 _______________________________________________ Squeezecenter mailing list Squeezecenter@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/squeezecenter
