Integration with Roon was certainly one of the best moves TIDAL has made. It has enhanced their service tremendously and increased my enjoyment of it exponentially. Thank you to everyone involved in making this partnership happen and great to see @palbratelund in the forums.
Looking forward to MQA being added to this mix. Can either of you comment on what this will look like and when it will happen (if it happens)?
I’m probably not the only one who is anticipating streaming MQA from TIDAL with the gorgeous GUI and SQ of Roon. Like what you see in Roon?
And TIDAL makes Roon awesome too… before TIDAL, building your library was a painful and expensive experience.
We did it just “ok” with Rhapsody + Sooloos. But, because TIDAL was so cooperative with their backend raw data dumps, Roon is able to do some pretty amazing things that would have been impossible with any other streaming music service.
…and this is just the tip of the iceberg. We have a lot more planned to make this experience even more awesome. We only really got started with this relationship in March… I cant wait until the dust settles from our launch and we can go back to our really innovative roadmap.
I haven’t seen Tidal tracks appear in my Radio feed yet, but I do have a large library. It would be good to control the amount of Tidal supplemental material in radio feeds, and the ability to select hi-res or preferred tracks only from all libraries for Radio playback.
No ding against Tidal’s library at all, but their native app UI is focused on things I didn’t care about in the least. I was seriously about to cancel my Tidal membership until Roon came along and made the whole thing click. Now I am keeping Tidal as an integral part of my music experience.
Completely agree. TIDAL has opened up a world of variety that would have been unattainable if each album had to be purchased individually. ROON keeps it looking and sounding great.
However, both you and @palbratelund gracefully (and graciously?) side-stepped the main question. It is understood that not every development can or should be immediately disclosed, but anything you can give us is greatly appreciated (and you guys have been very gracious about this).
In the meantime, will be looking forward to those updates from TIDAL and seeing where the Roon roadmap leads.
@Jeffrey, I don’t know of and can’t speak to TIDAL’s MQA plans, if they had something public to announce, I’m sure they would.
I have stated in the past that we with are working with Meridian to get the MQA software decoder in Roon, but there is no public timeline.
Where as I can speak freely about my business, I’m going to guess that TIDAL’s hands are a bit more tied down by the labels. There is a lot of complexity in the content business that just doesn’t exist in my world. If they send down MQA, Roon will absolutely send it to your DAC bit-perfect, and when we have the software decoder, we will render it to hi-res PCM.
I have been to a MQA demonstration using special edition DSP7200s. My question when you say it has the MQA decoder in Roon, is… does that mean if I have a MQA album, Roon will do the decoding to analog and I don’t have to have a Meridian unit in the chain?
I asked over at Tidal about their progress in implementing MQA which Robert Harley (May/June issue of Stereophile on page 50) stated would begin streaming MQA content in Q2 of 2015. Their response was: “We are still working on TIDAL with MQA, so unfortunately we do not have a release date yet. We will send out a newsletter and press release when it is ready.”
Mike
