I signed up for a Nugs account and I am enjoying the shows a lot. I have had no issues getting them to play through my Roon at all.
But I was extremely disappointed to find that there are a LOT of shows that are ruined by being encoded with MQA. And as of yet I haven’t been able to figure out how to tell except to watch for the MQA indicator on my DAC.
This is far worse than I thought, so far MOST of the shows are encoded with MQA. I may have to ask for a refund…
Yeah…see below.
I messaged Roon last night about this
This is far worse than I thought, so far MOST of the shows are encoded with MQA. I may have to ask for a refund…
Are you not on the free trial?
Also, according to the Roon signal path, the Tidal catalogue is still rife with MQA versions. Months after Tidal claimed the entire library would be changed to Flac versions.
No, I didn’t want to pay monthly so I opted for the annual plan. I should have waited for the trial to end buy I was impatient…
After some reflection and listening to a couple of shows I have decided that I’m going to relax about this.
I’ve already had to maintain a sliding scale of quality expectations when it comes to live recordings for many decades.
The convenience of being able to seamlessly listen to so many excellent shows by so many excellent artists outweighs the MQA pollution to me, at least for now.
And in spite of the MQA pollution, the sound is not nearly as bad as many of the ROIOs I already have in my collection…
if the light didn’t light up how would you have known?
as you say, just enjoy the music and don’t worry about the format.
Well, part of me agrees with that sentiment. But another part of me remembers that Nugs advertises high resolution audio files, and specifically states that they stream flac, which are in fact lossless. I link that they are not being entirely honest, and that I’m not getting the sound quality that I’m paying for because they were stupid enough to fall for MQA’s lies.
I really don’t have an issue with how MQA sounds plus at a minimum the first fold is CD quality. MQA really only leaves a bad taste in my mouth because of it’s proprietary format and the shady practices of hiding from users that MQA blended lossy with lossless making it not actually lossless.
I agree 100%, this is the problem we have with MQA.
I don’t believe that the first unfold is CD quality, I believe that many people have demonstrated that, but at this moment I am not going to dig out that info and just for the purposes of discussion say that perhaps you’re right.
As you state, MQA has been dishonest from the start and I am disappointed to learn that Nugs has fallen for their lies.
My equipment is able to do the full unfolding and rendering, I am getting what MQA claims is the best quality that can be gotten from this despicable format. And as I mentioned previously, it is not horrible sounding, it’s at least better than a lot of the boots that I have enjoyed for years.
So I’m going to relax and enjoy the shows.
But I would appreciate it if Roon and / or Nugs figured out some way to denote that MQA is involved in the shows I’m selecting. Even Tidal, as horrible as they are, indicates that a title was MQA encoded. I think that’s the least we should be able to expect.
i have no problem with MQA, sounds great to me, and clearly the artists who have licensed their shows to nugs feel the same way.
it’s a feature, not a bug.
On the Nugs app, under settings you can turn off MQA hi-res audio and leave hi-res audio on. I figured that Roon would duplicate this hence my support ticket, unfortunetely not anytime soon.
Not quite, MQA is an option not ‘there main event’ there is Flac, flac-hd etc, just not in Roon at the moment
Organizations have a history of encoding files into MQA without even discussing it with artists. Warner Brothers encoded pretty much their entire catalog without discussing it with artists. It’s not a good idea to assume that the artists involved have given their OK.
You can also just look at the source line in the signal path.
Yes, I should have mentioned that also, that’s what caused me to look harder at my DAC’s display.
As far as I understand, “They” Is not nugs or labels, but the actual artist’s who supply nugs the concert files. So, you would have to ask the artists to stop providing MQA.
Unlike other streaming services, nugs deals directly with the artists, see…
From Forbes
“Unlike other streaming companies that operate as third parties, Nugs.net secures performance rights directly from the artists it works with, and pays them directly.”