Is Tidal MAX actually lossless and not just relabeled MQA

Roon Software Discussion TIDAL
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Hi yall, hope you’re all doing well.

So like many this week (I assume), I was delighted to receive the news of Tidal integrating HiFi plus into the HiFi tier, making myself surprised, and making my life, just a little nicer. With this however, and like many people may think of in the coming weeks who use Tidal and Qobuz, if it would make sense to move from both services to just tidal with the larger library, true lossless audio, and most importantly to me, would constitute a cheaper overall price for me with roon, as considering I am a cheapa** high school student audiophile (the two hardest things to be simultaneously).

But when max was first announced and rolled out, Goldensound over on ‘The Headphone Show’ easily showed how it seemed to still be streaming MQA as seen here, however, through what has been seen in roon, along with hearing from tidal directly and others, the amount of MQA releases are now very little, with a majority of tracks now supporting FLAC.

So with that, so I don’t make a stupid decision changing services perhaps, is Tidal MAX true lossless, and (even though this isn’t the main issue of the post here) would it be too bad of an idea to switch from the land of spinning records, to 45 degree angle squares.

All thoughts and feedback are much appreciated, and thank you all for reading and responding.

Anyways, take care ya’ll

  • Reuben :grin:
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EDIT: Tidal is replacing MQA with high resolution lossless flac files. Some lower resolution MQA files are being replaced with CD quality flac files.

The point of rolling HiFi Plus into Tidal at $10.99 is to give everyone access to HIGH RESOLUTION for $10.99. They already have access to CD quality with just Tidal HiFi.

Here are my Tidal non-MQA files as of now…

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I have pretty much the same exact library in Qobuz. Here they are…

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I still have 423 MQA Tidal files remaining to be replaced. Some are actually MQA and some are just mis-labeled by Tidal/Roon. Those will be corrected, soon I hope.

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@Reuben_Grote As far as I know this isn’t the case anymore but someone like Goldensound would have to revisit and verify. There was at least a couple other folks who did their own testing in the past and verified that Tidal’s CD quality was just folded MQA but I don’t know if that is still the case or not and doubt that the hi-res is anything but hi-res.

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There is still MQA (and AAC)

If you’re on the hifi tier and the only available version is MQA it will serve MQA without the indicator.
If you’re on hifi plus and only MQA is available it will indicate MQA.
Although I save seen exceptions where MQA is indicated on the hifi tier as well.

MQA is gradually being replaced by FLAC but some new releases are MQA only.
And some titles are still only available in AAC.

If you want to sure you’re only getting FLAC Qobuz is still the better choice for now.

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I’m definitely seeing this still on HiFi Plus but hopefully this is only because Tidal hasn’t been provided true FLAC (CD quality or higher) yet. I’m kind of surprised they have made this move now with so many albums still available in MQA only.

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Tidal is not likely waiting on new files to be delivered. It already has a huge archive of lossless files because Tidal received the original high resolution or CD quality files in the first place. In most instances, MQA encoding came later.

AJ

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Then they are still working on adding these original lossless files (back in?) to their library? Are you saying Tidal did the MQA encoding and not the studios?

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Didn’t Goldensound upload flacs in a test some time ago that were converted to MQA?

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If you are really keen , get a demo of Audirvana Studio, it has a tool that can analyse a playing track to determine exactly what is being played. The idea was to detect Low Res masquerading as Hi Res

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I find this conversation interesting. I jumped ship on Qobuz a few weeks ago, in favour of Tidal. And one of the deciding factors for me (apart from reducing my monthly outlay) was actually listening to the music. I have a reasonable set-up (Pro-Ject DAC, Rega Brio amp and Kef LS50 speakers, or Meze 99 Classic headphones) and I honestly can’t tell the difference between file types. I’m not calling emperor’s new clothes on high resolution audio (it could just be that I have cloth ears), but for me at least, CD quality is plenty good enough. I realise that this could be regarded as sacrilegious in Roon circles, but hey…

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There are ecological considerations to take into account too. Streaming in 24/192 will have a significantly higher carbon footprint than streaming in CD-quality. If the difference in audio quality is non-existent or marginal (depending on your take on the subject, or your audio setup), is it ecologically responsible? Not trying to lecture anybody, just putting the question out there.

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Interesting point, can you quantify the footprint difference in Watt per hour, assuming a standard Nucleus as processing unit?

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Yeah I’ve noticed that in some releases kind of. Like Childish Gambino’s ‘Summer Pack’ only being delivered in MQA Studio 44.1. But then you have a release like Kanye West’s ‘Donda’ which, while the CD quality version is just that, no more, no less, the Hi-Res edition seems to appear in Hi-Res 48K and also MQA 48.

For me my plan with my music collection (and kind of why I’m using and loving roon) is the idea of over time, buying more of my tracks and albums through a service like Qobuz, and unless I buy the sublime tier (which I don’t have the money for anyways), theres no advantage for me to be subsribed to Qobuz or not if I’m just downloading music, and for me, using solely Tidal would be cheaper, and in my experience going through my library, there aren’t too many releases that have MQA still, like ‘Life Of Pablo’ which seems to share the same quality between Qobuz and Tidal.

But for other less played releases in my library, I’d still have to look for those releases.

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Yes he did, he uploaded an almost 40 minute video to his YT channel concerning MQA and its format, which I’ve linked here

That’s why since seeing that, I’ve despised of primarily using Tidal and MQA along with that. Also hearing reports of Artists not getting full royalties on Tidal compared to Qobuz, which pays some of the highest amounts out of any other service, is a somewhat big thing for me, being an artist myself, even though its not for my own financial gain as through roon, I just stream my original FLAC files and not the Qobuz or Tidal Versions, plus my distributor, DistroKid, seems to still be charging people to upload in Hi-Res on Tidal. (UPDATE: Actually, Now it appears that DK is not charging a penny to upload Hi-Res, but as far as I can see my previous releases haven’t changed, and who knows what will happen with my next release, 3.15.24)

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Is not just the local Roon server but every data center and Internet node along the way that carries more load, from disk sizes to bandwidth.

How big the impact is depends on many factors (type of power supply used by data centers being one of many), so it’s not easy to quantify.

But without doubt the streaming resource usage for hi-res is higher than for cd quality, so if the sound difference is nil it is a questionable waste.

There isn’t an article that has all the answers, but there are many asking the right questions, so this may serve as a start:

https://www.google.com/search?q=hi-res+music+streaming+environmental+impact

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With respect, there is a limit to my engagement with this.

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I have a great idea , lets reduce the carbon footprint even more by banning Adverts on web pages and converting all web pages to simple text with no pictures. No one needs them anyway.

While we are at it we could ban Social Media as well ,

It’s all a waste of bandwidth

:smiling_imp: :smiling_imp: :rofl:

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Yeah that’s what I’m kind of thinking as well.

Moved to Qobuz in December, 2021. Added on Tidal when I switched to roon last month. And I just want to listen to music at a good quality to price ratio if that makes sense, and with tidal’s move away from MQA, that is seeming to be more of a possibility. And I also Have reasonable setups (SMSL SU-6, Rotel RB-1590, Sonus Faber Sonetto VIII & 2 Rel T9X subs, along with Moondrop Variations and a Dragonfly Cobalt when I’m on the go)

For me, I’m not doing this for price, as if I wanted that, I’d be using spotify right now, but I’m also for the audio quality, and finding a good balance for my setup and situation might be to go with tidal and roon, and doing away with Qobuz as my average monthly pay would go from $35 down to $20!

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For the most part Tidal has replaced the 48/24 and higher MQA with true lossless hires equivalent. Roon no longer exposes the MQA version. I even found a few cases where Tidal has a 192/24 file vs Qobuz only 96/24. But the problem is 44/16 MQA files still exist. These don’t have a CD only equivalent yet. When you play the hires file, roon shows the true rate regardless of when the file says. And that how can tell not still getting MQA but actual hires. Plus the files sound the same as Qobuz when volume matched.

The other issue is roon doesn’t have all the correct meta data yet. So there are a lot of files that say mixed audio but whole album is in 96/24 hires. There are also some mistagged ones that say MQA but are lossless and some lossless that are MQA. And lastly Tidal still has the random AAC files.

And finally you have the issue of not all streamers have been updated with the Max setting yet. So unless you’re using roon, the hires files will either be MQA or some downsampled MQA version like on my Naim streamer. There are also older streamers that can’t be updated to receive hires.

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I’m curious about that too, if tidal has real Flac or just MQAs converted to Flac. On a side note though, here in Canada, I paid 150$ CAD for a year of Qobuz vs 19.99$ per month with Tidal which would equate 240$ per year, almost 100$ more. I don’t really see what the benefit would be to switch.