When you choose Hifi as the streaming bandwidth in the app you get bit perfect 16/44. If your bandwidth drops during streaming you will get a dropout. I believe this is the only mode supported in Roon.
If you look in the Tidal mobile app, in the settings you will be able to choose your streaming bandwidth. If you choose anything other than Hifi the stream will be downsampled and not bit perfect compared to the original 16/44. There’s also an option here that you can turn on called Optimized Playback which is adaptive streaming: it will switch quality down automatically depending on the bandwidth to your device.
Spotify is essentially the same except there’s no 16/44 bit perfect option.
In Roon no downsampled Tidal is supported as far as I know. Tidal either is bit perfect or you get dropouts. This is an ok choice because the bandwidth to stream 16/44 with FLAC compression is available to most people at home.
My point on adaptive streaming is that if, say, Tidal stored and streamed 24/96 or 24/192 files, then not everyone might be able to get uninterrupted streaming at that rate, so you could switch Tidal (either permanently or adaptively) to downsample server-side. You would obviously get something not bit perfect compared to the original file but could get the equivalent 16/44 without the size overhead you have in an MQA file (which is 24/48 and harder to compress) since the MQA file must be streamed bit perfect.
V[quote=“Chrislayeruk, post:367, topic:5408, full:true”]
You talk about this as if Tidal and MQA havnt thought about it.
[/quote]
I am just going through the known facts so far. If I missed something, by all means please point me to that new information.
If for example MQA decides to provide a server side downsampler to Tidal so that they could take the MQA files and downsample them to say 16/44 flac when bandwidth is limited, then I would think that would be a very smart thing for MQA to do. Alas, we don’t know this to be the case.
You speak of the Tidal/MQA deal as a reality - I am not so sure it will ever happen - we shall see.
I’d love higher res and MQA as a means to assert high quality production would be really great. I’m just giving my opinion on issues I see in takeup as well as other options in terms of streaming. If others have different/better/more accurate info, by all means post it here.
I just scrolled up the last few pages and every second post is by you. In other words you are writing as many words in this thread as the rest of the forum members put together.
I don’t call that “giving my opinion”, I call that trying to bore people into submission, and I for one have had enough.
