I’m having trouble locating any symphonic classical MQA albums on roon/tidal. Although I did find several good albums by searching “von Karajan” I cannot find any others.
I search pop/rock material by going to an artist and scrolling through the albums looking for the small “M” in the lower right corner, but this does not work with Roon/Tidal.
If anyone has uncovered some good classical MQA symphonic albums on Roon/tTdal I, and probably many other people, would appreciate it if you would reply to this post listing the albums.
I wish there were a way to search Tidal by record label. MQA partner labels include Warner Music Group, Sony Music, and Universal Music Group (UMG) among others. UMG includes Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and EMI so at least in theory there should be good MQA classical albums available but even then they may not yet be available on Tidal. Looks like there’s more than just Warner-related labels on Tidal now in MQA.
There are two Tidal MQA playlists for the 2L label - “TIDAL Masters: 2L Highlights, Vol. 1” and “TIDAL Masters: 2L Highlights, Vol. 2.” If you like any of the tracks you can of course get the whole album. Might be a decent start for some Classical MQA.
Thanks David. I had already done that (the 2L) and forgot to mention it in my original post.
There are a couple of other pieces in the title masters new arrivals but they are not to my liking.
I agree that searching by record label would be a plus.
I was able to turn up three albums on the reference recordings label (my favorite label) by searching for eiji oue, the conductor but none were in the MQA format although they are very high quality recordings and probably just as good as many MQA recordings
I was also able to turn up a few albums by searching by composers but none were in the mqa format.
Here are some MQA albums I found yesterday that I think are worth giving a listen to. I’m sure you’ve come across a number of them already. About 80% are 2L recordings - roughly 24/352 unfolded if I remember correctly. Should be pretty spectacular if you’ve got an MQA DAC. Even folded (24/48 I think) on my non-MQA DAC these sound wonderful. Quite a few of these 2L albums are not in the 2L playlists so I hope you find at least a handful of them to be new and enjoyable.
Have you looked in the “spread-sheet” over the available MQA albums on Tidal:
I seem to remember that it was someone here on the forum started the work collecting all albums in this document… but my memory is not that good anymore so I might be wrong.
Thank you, @hmartin! FWIW, I did a quick (non-exhaustive) look through the spreadsheet and found the following Classical artists that could be used to search Tidal:
Callas, Maria
Capuçon, Gautier
Capuçon, Renaud
Chamayou, Bertrand
Chang, Sarah
Da Costa, Alexandre
Dena Piano Duo
Engegård Quartet
Gergiev, Valery
Goode, Richard
Grainger, Percy
Haïm, Emmanuelle
Horn, Steffen
Jaroussky, Philippe
Jordan, Philippe
Kwetzinsky, Joachim
Menuhin, Yehudi
Minkowski, Marc
Pacini, Sophie
Pappano, Antonio
Perlman, Itzhak
Rattle, Sir Simon
Rebeka, Marina
Rostropovich, Mstislav
Tharaud, Alexandre
Thile, Chris
Thorsen, Marianne
Trondheim Symphony Orchestra
Trondheimsolistene
von Karajan, Herbert
To David and H Martin
thanks so much for the listings -the spreadsheet is incredible and the list of classical artists will keep me very busy.
one tip to find reference recordings: search Eiji Oue in the roon/tidal search window You will get several reference recording’s (not in MQA but probably just as good)
Yes I have a mqa Dac (ps audio direct stream Dac which I highly recommend) . it will be fun comparing the Mqa versions of these albums with their 16 bit counterparts
Thanks again
Warren
Unfortunately this list has not been updated in a few months. New MQA releases are coming out each week that do not make it to the list. I think many of us are looking for a comprehensive list.
There are a few that have been added in the last couple of months. This is a crowd sourced effort if you know of any missing MQA releases then help out by adding them.
Tidal does have a VERY limited selection of classical (and jazz) music. The, by far, best selection of this kind of music is available at Qobuz, but unfortunately, Roon does not prioritize the implementation of Qobuz - which is a real pitty.
I have found that the best technique for uncovering MQA classical albums is to search roon/tidal by composer. I have uncovered many MQA albums by searching the following composers and then scrolling through their albums looking for the “M” designation.
Herbert von Karajan
sir Simon rattle
Valerie Gergiev
Most of the music is fairly old and, since I have not had the time to listen carefully, I cannot attest to their sound quality
Searches based on other composers have not been so productive
If you haven’t seen them, Universal MQA versions are now on Tidal, so lots of Decca and DG files.
Some great recordings, including the Solti and Karajan Ring Cycles, Barenboim’s recent Elgar and Bruckner, classic Kleiber Beethoven (5&7), ‘Traviata’ etc.
They do seem to be adding lots of Universal titles lately. Brand new complete Mozart Symphonies with Bohm, Karl Richter’s Bach Cantatas. Some are really difficult to find. For instance, there’s a Karajan Prokofiev 5th with Stravinsky’s Sacre. Try all you like to find it by searching Karajan & Prokofiev and nothing turns up, but under Stravinsky Sacre it does. What the heck! I recommend going to HDtracks and doing a label search for DG (click “all labels” then find Deutsche Grammophon) then go back to Tidal and search for titles of interest. Most of them do seem to be available now. There are some nice Warner reissues available also (Beecham’s Carmen!).
I wish one could do a Roon Tidal search for an artist and narrow that search down by MQA without having to add them to one’s library. Perhaps it is possible and I don’t know how?
It has been fun with Tidal and Roon and there’s certainly enough to keep one busy, BUT for Classical Tidal is such a disaster in terms of organization that I think the upcoming launch of Quboz in the US should be integrated into Roon ASAP. Quboz by all right should be the nail in the coffin for Tidal, which has utterly dropped the ball, and is run by idiots. Tidal has not ONCE fixed any of the old Universal titles afflicted with flutter. The lied to me almost 2 years ago about expecting “redilivery” of these faulty titles. It never happened. And MQA is nice, but Qobuz has actual hi-Rez streaming and downloads available, so bye-bye MQA, and bye-bye Tidal. I gave you 2 faithful years to try and get it together.
