Hi ya’ll.
So last week on the 6th, I made a post asking about if Tidal MAX was relabeling MQA as lossless or if their new claims of lossless we’re actually true (Link to that post here). And after much discussion, there of course is still content on tidal under the format, but a majority of the releases now appear under lossless FLAC, and seem to be that way thanks to other peoples testing through the community.
So now, I have to directly ask the question that drew me into my discussion from last week… would it be smart to possibly move from Qobuz, over to Tidal?!
Now while again, most things don’t appear to be in MQA, with most MQA labeled releases playing in CD quality FLAC (such as: Don’t Give Up - Chapter & Verse) some releases still play in MQA (such as: Summer Pack - Childish Gambino). Now the thing I have to ask with the whole discussion about MQA being lossless or not is this: If a track has MQA, but reports as CD quality FLAC in roon, is the true lossless version playing?
Another thing that I’ve noticed is tracks/releases that don’t have any labelling. In this case a release will just say “TIDAL” next to the logo (Such as: The “Classics” - Dingus Reuben (
)) with the release page having nothing next to the tidal logo, the of which being a weird anomaly I only see with Tidal releases and not Qobuz or local storage tracks. However, those tracks end up playing in CD quality in the end. But with that lack of audio quality labeling, is that supposed to signal a lack of CD quality or something similar. I do believe it is lossless and not AAC though as those releases don’t report as such, either on the release page, or signal path in roon.
And one more thing is concerning MQA playback. For my main Hi-Fi setup, I have only a Mac Mini acting as a roon server and endpoint, and an SMSL SU-6 as my Primary DAC, with no hardware in my system that has any sort of MQA (at least on the digital side of course). So when playing MQA files through my system, all I get is MQA authentication and thats it! So with that, is there a better way to handle MQA files or is it best to stick with the way I have everything all set up? I’m also asking this as I do have hardware that does have MQA support (Bluesound Node & Dragonfly Cobalt) and I’m seeing if there’s a recommended way to run MQA through these devices without experiences the downsides and negatives of the format.
Anyways, It’s a bit of a long post (and kind of redundant one IMO) but no matter what, thank you all for reading, and I’ll try and respond as much as possible.
Anyways, stay safe, and take care ya’ll.
- Reuben
