Floyd in MQA on Tidal

When I go into my Tidal app all the Pink Floyd albums are now in Master ( MQA) quality but this is not replicated in Roon.

Is there a refresh button to force these through to my Roon Rock core?

I’m in the UK btw as I know these releases can be geographically dependent. As I say they’re in the Tidal app so available in the UK.

@James_Knotts can you show screenshots of what you see in Tidal app for these albums?

If it just got released today on Tidal, it might take a day or two to show up in Roon.

Not showing on my Tidal US account just yet.

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Only the image caption is wrong (is that normal for Roon?) Signal Path and my DAC shows correct data.

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You are correct the signal path shows MQA but the albums still say FLAC 44.1kHz 16bit. Does anyone know if this will update itself over time in Roon?

This will update in time, I believe there have been a lot of MQA releases via Tidal using the same ID code as the CD. The system will catch up in time… Enjoy the Music

They are sourced from 16bit 44.1kHz CD master.

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@Richard_Parker Did you read that somewhere? Could you please share the source? Thanks

tidal and mqa

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Indeed. MQA is a scam.

I’m not seeing this in the USA. Still 16/44 for me. Maybe this is limited to outside the US?

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Very helpful. Thanks.

There you go… :slight_smile:

Same. In fact, the Pink Floyd page in Roon isn’t the same as the others for me. I can’t even select albums anymore, just individual performances. This just changed.

Thanks, but my question was where did he that the SOUCES for creating the Floyd MQA files were 16bit 44.1kHz. The press release says they will use 16bit 44.1kHz as a worst case when other formats don’t exist. Since higher quality masters do exist for Floyd, I was just curious if he was speaking from knowledge or not. Seems not. But I agree that MQA is mostly hype.

I do not know if this is applicable in the specific case of Pink Floyd recordings, but there is not necessarily a correlation between sampling rate and master quality. Said another way:

master quality ≠ mastering quality

Over the years, I’ve spent an embarrassing amount at sites like HDTracks to reacquire favorite recordings at higher sampling rates, generally to find that sound quality is rarely better than my dusty old CDs, and occasionally, it’s worse! A high-rez Cars album that I bought from HDTracks turned out to be the 24-bit, 192 kHz files from the studio after they remastered the album for ear-bud listeners (boosted bass and compressed dynamic range). LOL.

We naively assume that if a recording is available at 24-bits, 192 kHz, the source and mastering quality are worthy of the high-rez treatment and associated storage and bandwidth cost. All too often, this is not the case.

I’ve found that this applies to MQA as well. According to the marketing, we’re receiving the version that was approved by the artist, from analog to analog and all of that. But, were members of Pink Floyd actually consulted before their albums were re-released on TIDAL in MQA? Possible (for the members still alive), but I’d be surprised. :wink:

This is an issue of roon to my mind, For instance there is a new release of delicate sound of thunder remastered out, been out for a while but its hid in the ‘versions’ of delicate sound of thunder already in my library and consequently hidden in tidal. I had no idea about it until I launched tidal on my phone the other week.

Yeah. I’m not sure how Roon Labs would solve this problem. Each album version in TIDAL has a unique album ID. If you “favorited” the non-MQA version before an MQA version was available, how should Roon handle this?

Perhaps it could watch for new versions of your TIDAL favorites and automatically add them to your library. But, should it also tag the newest version as “Primary”, potentially overriding your hand-picked choices? Should it unfavorite (remove) the older versions? How would you tell Roon what you want, and what if what you want is different from album to album?

I’m not trying to argue…just trying to look at this from the developer’s perspective. This is a somewhat messy problem.

I wonder how other music servers, like Audirvana handle this.

Certainly not if it’s not an MQA studio release.