ElTel
April 29, 2021, 10:58pm
23
danny:
If you are in Australia, presumably you can switch to the new “middle” tier and get no MQA streams. I don’t have access to that new tier, so I can’t tell you for sure, and as far as I know, no one has reported information either way.
I had exchanges with a poster on Stereo.net.au in order to test exactly this. He created a brand new Tidal account on the new Hi-Fi tier here in Oz and then tested through Roon to check out the signal path. Here is my cross-post to Roon community summarising:
So it seems after some testing, and if the signal path is correct, that if you setup a new Tidal sub to the HiFi tier expecting lossless 44.1/16 FLAC then you’re going to be getting something other than you bargained for.
Whilst not completely consistent (some artists and albums behave differently to others), it does seem like the HiFi (non-MQA) tier can and does serve-up MQA streams. I asked the tester to repeat the tests with the infamous Led Zep MQA only catalogue and sure enough, he got spu…
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