Tidal - All Neil Young albums before 1982 are gone. Thanks TIDAL!

Today all Neil Young albums before 1982 are gone. Thanks TIDAL!
First they replace a great amount of lossless albums with poor mqa versions and now that.
After the holidays I will give Qobuz a try.

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You should probably complain to Neil Young as it’s his music and no doubt this will be a licence issue.
Nothing poor about the MQA versions I heard… Perhaps he would prefer you to buy the CDs

Neil Young albums before 1982 still available at Qobuz (for now at least !)
Dirk

Neil doesn’t believe in compression of any kind unless your system or network can’t handle it. His own download service in the Neil Young Archives generally streams 192K/24bit uncompressed files created from his masters. I personally don’t think you’ll ever see Neil Young in MQA again.

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I know he is an advocate for high-resolution but…I still see his albums in Apple Music (definitely compressed there.) Must be some fallout with Tidal.

Neil is high on Amazon (surprisingly), Qobuz and his own service.

In his own words “First, our recent alignment and arrangement with Amazon - This is to make sure as many people get to hear my music the way I made it as possible. It has only to do with the quality of music presented at Amazon. It is better than all others, just like xstream is better. The notable exception is Qobuz. This is a great service.”

You can read the whole article here:

Notice no mention of Tidal/MQA or Apple Music.

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No, no license issue. Neil Young removed his albums because of MQA.
Read here:


Even if you hear ‘nothing poor about the MQA versions’, Mr. Young hears it in another way and has clear words about MQA: ‘I feel that my masters are in no way improved. They are degraded and manipulated. I made them. I know the difference. I can hear it’.

Read the article and you will see that he has no issues with other streaming services.
Facts not claims!

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He is entitled to do as he wishes with his music, MQA do not rule the world then :joy:
I have the CDs already if I want to enjoy his music… That will have to do and there is so much more music to enjoy out there, plenty of MQA also.

Apple doesn’t advertise them as a master. Tidal was and then delivering it in a format that clearly isn’t the master to Neil’s ears. To make it worst it requires licensing fees to get the original sample rate back, which he also doesn’t agree with.

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Just saw his note on NYA. Too bad Amazon doesn’t stream bitperfect.

Don’t know what you mean, please explain.

It’s Amazon’s app that is the problem apparently. The bluesound Node integration does seem to do it fine.

As @DrTone noted, you can’t get a bit-perfect stream unless you use Bluesound and even there I think you are restricted to certain bitrates. In my case, the degradation to the sound quality coming from the Amazon app through the OS mixer is worse than anything I can perceive in the bitperfect MQA delivery with TIDAL. I get Neil Young is picky about the way his music is delivered and I wish more artists were that conscious but I am surprised he hears such a difference with MQA. I think its a matter of principle and that should be enough rationale.

I tried Amazon HD and would have considered staying with them but the lack of bitperfect as well as integration with Roon kept me from sticking with it.

He supports Qobuz too. HD uncompressed files are there… Probably better than Amazon.

I noticed the removal of the majority of Neil Young’s catalog from Tidal while I was on holiday. I explored the NYA website due to a post on Roon from a gentleman whose wife bought him NYA Volume II for Christmas. Since I am fortunate enough to have a Node 2i that will stream NYA, I signed up for a NYA full subscription for $20/yr. I wish NYA was offered as a service through Roon. It would be a great match since both parties have a sincere interest in quality streaming.

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Yup, I have Qobuz and see the high-resolution albums there. Their catalog is improving steadily and I hope they can grow their market share.

The NY albums on Qobuz are available only up to 24/96. The original 24/192 you can stream many European countries with highresaudio.com. You can download them there as well as at 7digital.com and more expensive, at HDtracks.com.

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On Wednesday 6th January, it will be four years since I first streamed MQA files from Tidal. I believe Neil Young knew about MQA prior to this date, and had contact with Bob Stuart in relation to Pono. The language of MQA and Masters has been consistent, way before Tidal streamed MQA.
And so a man, who is admirably particular about the way his works are accessed takes 4 years to make this public statement…why now? He must have had an unusually high level of insight prior to Tidal launching the MQA Masters?
The support for Amazon HD (if also Qobuz) is interesting, given how in many places the label of HD has been thoroughly questioned…a week ahead of CES.
It seems there may be something rotten in the State of Denmark…(or perhaps Seattle).

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Neil Young removes his music from Tidal b/c of MQA. Says it isn’t the sound of his masters.
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Probably another $$ driven reason.

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