Roon radio Tidal MQA limiting

I didn’t try Qobuz for long as, at the time, it didn’t have Android Auto. Choices, choices.

I posted a request to Tidal and asked :thinking:

Roon Radio makes a recommendation based on your listening preferences and the Roon community’s listening preference not the format, i.e. it uses the most popular version. However, by selecting Hi-Fi you are limiting Roon to a 44.1kHz 16bit version of the track regardless of the recommendation.

Roon Radio FAQs

Can I set quality requirements for Roon Radio selections?

For a given track, there may be many different versions, including different sample rates, between what is available in your local library, TIDAL, and Qobuz. Our selections are based on what version is the most popular, even if there are potentially versions with a higher sample rate available. At this time that is not something that can be changed.

https://kb.roonlabs.com/FAQ:_What’s_Radio_and_how_does_it_work%3F

I think OP’s question is a reasonable one, and I was wondering along the same lines.

If I set Streaming Quality to Hi-FI and play a TIDAL album for which there is no 44.1kHz FLAC version (see On the Line by Jenny Lewis, for example, which is MQA 48kHz 24 bit only), Roon reports a lossless signal path with “TIDAL FLAC 44.1kHz 16bit 2ch” as the source.

This seems to indicate that 48kHz is being converted at some point to 44.1kHz, or that the displayed data is incorrect either on the TIDAL side or the Roon side.

More broadly, I find it just a bit weird that I can go to my Library and choose an MQA album version to play and Roon will play a different version instead. It seems to me that two design principles of Roon are 1) transparently display the signal path and 2) a digital music collection should be more like a collection of physical media. If you had two versions of an album on a shelf and you chose to play a specific one, it would be very weird if the other version started playing instead.

IMO, if you set streaming quality to Hi-Fi (i.e. no MQA) and MQA albums are still displayed in the UI, then Roon should not choose the MQA version in Radio and should play the MQA version if you specifically choose it. Alternatively, setting streaming quality to Hi-Fi should hide MQA albums in the UI.

Personally, I think there should be a streaming quality option that applies only to Roon Radio, and then there should be separate option to set 16/44.1 versions to a higher priority than MQA in the Library.

Hello Everyone,

I believe this is the reason why you may run into MQA content when you have limited Tidal to “HiFi” in Roon’s settings:

-John

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