Does anyone know what happens to any higher res albums if I were to downgrade to a standard Tidal subscription? Would my albums simply disappear or would they be substituted with 16/44.1 versions?
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A wild guess, your favourite is pointing to a link for the chosen album , say the MQA version, the 44,1/16 will be a different link so highly unlikely to update.
There are threads concerning “lost favourites “ where an album link changes for licensing reasons , Roon doesn’t update
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All mine are still in my library after downgrade to hifi from plus, and roon plays the 14/44.1 versions. (Some are still 16/44.1 mqa.)
Don’t know what will happen when roon updates for max/flac, but the tidal app still shows all my albums as available but just plays them at 16/44.1.
So in short, no disruption so far.
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I think I recall seeing this discussed before and it still has me wondering.
I’m tentatively planning to downgrade from HiFi Plus to HiFi in about 3 weeks.
My primary question:
Will 16/44 MQA content be converted on TIDAL’s end to a non-MQA stream which would still have been processed and processed again.
According to TIDAL staff, they are rolling out conventional non-MQA 16/44 FLAC but it’s still all a mystery to me.
It is rather frustrating.
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Until Tidal announce their intentions we will not know , they have so far not declared MQA is to go completely
There seems two balancing issues
- The processing power requirement to convert MQA to 16/44.1 on the fly (assuming they keep their existing formats)
or
- The additional storage to keep a 16/44.1 copy and the original MQA
Until the conversion of their whole library (1oo million tracks) I suspect a mix
Sit back and enjoy the music whatever format …
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I downgraded a few weeks back as a precursor to moving to Qobuz. Nothing disappeared from my library but I didn’t concern myself with the exact version of the 16/44.1 then being streamed.
I asked this on tidal’s reddit max/flac announcement. They say yes, the mqa files will be replaced with flac. Who knows how long it will take?
In another q&a, someone asked about replacing existing mqa versions in your library with flac versions and would it be automatic. They said generally yes, but that it was mainly up to the label/distributor to resubmit the albums/tracks with the same ID. Sounds like a mess.
Hello, I can give my experience here, I have gone from HIFI Plus to Hifi and I did not lose any favorites, on the other hand Tidal continues to play in MQA even if it is in 16/44.1, the quality from my point of view has not been affected, There are no differences, if the recordings are good they will continue to sound spectacular and if they are bad they will continue to sound bad. Regarding the integration with Roon in my case and even though I configure correctly indicating that my Dac decodes and renders the MQA, the signal always appears as if there was a change. And as a note, I use Qobuz as primary and Tidal as secondary, prioritizing Roon Qobuz and from my point of view Qobuz is slightly superior.
Does Roon (or does Tidal’s API to Roon) need to be updated to allow preferential showing of hi-res non-MQA content in the Roon interface? Asking because I’m no longer using an MQA DAC, and my understanding is that Roon will do the first MQA unfold, but not the second
Roon can do MQA decoding, but only a DAC can do MQA rendering. Tidal needs to update the API for Roon.
Tidal should be equal to Qobuz when this transition is finished, just more expensive.
Which is what I meant. I’ve actually got nothing against MQA, but would now rather see only non-MQA versions in the interface. From a SQ PoV, I find that I generally prefer Qobuz 24/96 content to Master quality MQA - I’d stay with Tidal (more reliable streaming) if they were planning to match Qobuz hi-res quality