Not to worry, Rayski, Tidal is NOT pushing the sh!t out…they have been working on this with the studios for a while, but just didn’t open the doors until there was enough for us to get excited about…otherwise, it’s just another 2L label experience that we’ve all been complaining about for the last year. Sounds great, just not anything we want to listen to every day.
I believe Tidal is not processing the content, the publisher is. And have apparently been working on it for quite some time.
Australian version of Masters tab does not seem to have been updated for days. I could of course play random albums and check for the Tidal “Master” indication but that is sooooo time consuming. That said, these are first world problems aren’t they ?
I’d just like to confirm that we are making a distinction between something being MQA encoded and another having the full Master Authentication?
Warner Music have been MQA encoding for a long time. Also The A in MQA means authenticated. If the light comes on then you are receiving the genuine master file uncorrupted. Anything less and the light will not shine.
Chris
Just went through the tedious work of adding all the master records I could find listed in Sweden. Found 940 entries with 1143 discs in total.
61 known region locked.
I used TIDAL where it quickly tells you if it is a master record or not way before any music starts playing and if you are fast enough it will be silent but usually a tiny bit of music is heard. After reaching Z I’m glad for roon excel export.
I’ve figured out that the artist favourite is not really used in roon so I can navigate most music that way. Just navigating about 1000 albums in TIDAL is not ideal working in the artist view you need to scroll a lot or bunch them all together. 360 artists in roon is also a lot more than I usually used to.
Obviously being a master recording does not make something a favourite but that is how I try to get a grip about it. I’m probably not alone in wishing for MQA support in roon beyond what is there already with MQA DACs.
I don’t even have the equipment available to being able to compare audio. But anything that reduces audio quality must be bad. Like compressed music and redbook CDs that are a good compromise as audio solution.
I don’t know where I belong as I care about music quality a lot but have a fairly cheap $700 sound system that I’m happy with. Most people I meet run Spotify free or Spotify premium. Spotify has real good name recognition especially here in pioneering Sweden. They are well known and nobody knows what TIDAL is. It appears to be just as hard to convert a Spotify free user to Premium and getting people to jump ship over to TIDAL HIFI and pay twice as much for HIFI quality just doesn’t happen. The high quality compressed music is just good enough for most people.
Sorry for going a bit off topic but master tracks is all about sound quality which is really hard to measure. I’m really happy to get master tracks for free. I mean I already have TIDAL HIFI so any improvement is great.
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Spotify users should understand that if the service is Free, They are the product.
You could get a Meridian Explorer 2 to unlock some MQA goodness. Not expensive.
The spreadsheet is opening in “View Only” mode for me now. I’ve made several edits/additions over the last few days but today I’m locked out. Anyone else experiencing this?
In my mind the DAC should be done as close to the speakers as possible.
This is why my computer uses a digital soundcard for playback.
To get MQA in this setup I need software MQA which TIDAL already provides.
I just perhaps false believes that running a aux wire to the amplifier will not be lossless.
And with headphones it cost twice as much as my most expensive headset so it requires some spending money but until then I’ll just wait and see how roon handles the situation.
If you want the most technically correct solution you will need to spend more money.
Meridian DSP SE speakers have the DACs at the drivers. Not cheap but sound lovely.
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AtkCLbBCBnwRj-1owtr2PVc1ALjz2g
Sharing my spreadsheet I just finished.
My thinking is that when you encounter an album you know exists somewhere else add it to region locked for your country.
It’s a pretty complete dump of master albums.
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Regarding DAC there is a lot happening in the analog chain to the speakers.
We have a subwoofer to consider in many cases. The quality of the sound depends on much more than the DAC.
The headphones equation is different but you sacrifice the low frequencies.
Yes , If you scroll across to column Q on the spreadsheet you can see which albums have been confirmed available in the UK
Seems I can’t edit the online spreadsheet, so I’ll just report these: Alexandre Tharaud: Autograph; Mozart, Haydn Piano Concertos; Bach: Goldberg Variations.
That’s three albums.
It’s my understanding (although I could certainly be wrong) that virtually all the MQA “Masters” are sourced from existing digital files, in the highest resolution available. MQA claims their encoding process itself makes the “Masters” files sound better by removing the “smearing” caused by the ADC that created the original digital file. They also claim if they know what ADC was used in creating the file they can better correct for this “smearing.” Their “Remastering” process is simply encoding the existing digital file with MQA parameters set for the ADC (if this information is available). Of course, the MQA decoding process is also necessary to reveal all the information.
Thus, it is very easy to produce 941 “Masters” files in a short period of time. I believe virtually all the digital source files are 88, 96, 176 or 196, although a few are 44.1 or 48. This is why the decoded files show up at different rates. They are “unfolding” the data back to the bitrate of the digital source file, but not higher.
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Thanks. I’ve found some gems here that I didn’t know about!
Very likely true of all we’ve seen so far, since those were first and easiest. But Stuart has said that Warner is converting everything, including the as-yet undigitized analog tape. That’s a bit harder to digest, but it’s what he said.
Jim
Hi all, just seen the notes regarding not being able to edit the sheet anymore and I’ll take a look in the morning (UK)and see what’s up.
Yes, Stuart claims MQA will be part of the ADC studio mastering in the future. That certainly makes a more compelling case for MQA improving SQ to a much greater extent than simply encoding existing digital masters. But that’s not going to happen 30,000 tracks at a time.
Hmm, I get this one in Hifi.
I’m in the U.S. Where are you?