Yes I remember seeing them when they were first uploaded, very interesting. I mentioned it in response to someone querying who did the conversion to MQA, I believe it to be Tidal not the record label due to the Goldensound videos.
That I don’t recall but I stopped paying attention to MQA some time ago after it became quite obvious it was nothing more than snake oil.
How are you determining this? Does other playback software show the correct metadata?
MQA uses the FLAC container. That is how backwards compatibility is achieved and I think how Tidal has been able to use folded up MQA as “CD quality FLAC” for the standard tier.
Roon tells you the streaming. MQA were always 24/48 files or something like that that gets unfolded. These are true hires files. Stripping out the MQA info won’t show up as 192/24 like it does. I’m sure Tidal either had them already or the label just sent them in. There are not converting MQA files. It seems Todal is as interested in getting away from MQA as you are. No MQA means no more fees. I believe even roon getting charge per play for MQA.
Believe this one is only 96/24 in Qobuz. My subscription has expired.
Vs this MQA file that 44/14
Hi-res MQA, yes, is always 24-bit 44.1 or 48 before unfolding, but there are 16-bit MQA tracks too.
No, but they have been passing off folded up MQA as CD quality FLAC so it makes sense people are questioning Tidal MAX.
Agreed. Seems they are even jumping the gun a bit since there are so many metadata issues still and MQA only (including 16-bit) versions of albums/tracks.
I’ve seen posts from Danny confirming this so Tidal’s latest move makes sense.
I personally want to see all of MQA gone but the 44/16 ones don’t bother me much and can’t personally hear the difference. I trust the hires files are indeed hires. Think Tidal is moving in the right direction with competitive pricing and moving away from MQA.
I believe the MQA files being passed off as CD files had to do with CD tier. If the label didn’t supply them with a true lossless file, they had no choice but to transcode for that pay tier. Now switching to single tier, you get access to files as is.
What’s interesting is they still have MQA files on their server but once roon got access to hires files, they had the MQA version hidden. Don’t even see as a version. If you didn’t upgrade to latest release, you could still play 96/24 MQA files. There might even be a few remaining that were missed. But at some point, would think Tidal would purge all the MQA files once replacement is complete.
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When I did a deep dive of my library it was almost all the ones 88k and higher that were no longer MQA. Still some at the 48k MQA remaining and quite a bit of the 44/16 MQA. I’m guessing they are replacing in waves and higher urgency to get the library loaded with a lot of 96k and high files. Or it just possible just had to do with what record labels have sent the hires version to Tidal.
At this point, I stopped stressing about the bit rates and more interested in what’s available. Generally speaking, Tidal has more albums than Qobuz. Found one artist where Tidal had an additional 12 albums due to those being a different label than rest of the artist. So Qobuz still has a few pockets where they never brought in some of these small indie labels.
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The “superior sounding format” is going the way of the Dodo, and it doesn’t look like generic engineering is going to bring it back.
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I use Tidal for streaming and music discovery. Once I know I like an album, EP, or Single I purchase it for long term play through either Qobuz or Bandcamp. In this way only one subscription is required. Well two really because I don’t have Roon Lifetime but would definitely go for it if they do another Lifetime deal.
what died didn’t stay dead.
What is dead may never die
Well with Tidal’s price decrease to having everything at around $10 a month would be cheaper than using Qobuz at ~$14 a month. If i were for cheaper, I wouldn’t be using or paying for streaming at all, but I also want to still have good overall audio quality, primarily avoiding MQA, and while I have it set to prefer everything else over MQA, it will still play MQA on some tracks, even if theres a FLAC version along with MQA
Yeah but when it comes to the label stuff and all, I self publish everything and when I started, I never paid to have any of my stuff come out in MQA, which I belive has always been that way since I don’t believe in paying extra to upload in a higher quality, and why for a long time i’ve endorsed other lossless services like Qobuz, apple, and amazon.
Now though with Tidal mostly getting rid of MQA, and going to true FLAC and with the price decrease, thats why I’m now all of a sudden thinking of changing my Streaming service situation.
with them doing that for CD quality tracks, does that make a noticeable difference between native CD FLAC and CD MQA?
Could you list the release so I can confirm that on my end with me having both Tidal and Qobuz
Yeah that’s my idea as I love Qobuz. I think its great in the Hi-Fi world, their download store is great, and for both that and streaming, it has some of the highest quality audio I’ve found on any service. (If only they could also maybe find some way to stream DSD lol)
Again, this whole things comes up to me as I think it would be great to primarily use Tidal for streaming, and Qobuz for downloads, all with Roon. This would also shave some money off the amount I pay for music monthly, and Tidal does and (for better or worse) always has had a bigger library than Qobuz.
Personally though, I don’t want to use MQA as little as possible. I have the hardware to use the format (Dragonfly Cobalt for On the go, Bluesound Node in my bedroom) if needed, even though all hardware could use it, but my main Hi-Fi setup doesn’t have MQA support of any kind. (SMSL SU-6 DAC coming from a Mac Mini Running as my Roon server and endpoint) Point is; I’d love to still use tidal, assuming I don’t have to have MQA shoved down my throat every two seconds.
Someone launder me money for that 