Tidal Master albums are downsampled in roon to 24bit 48Khz [Answered]

I have added a few 'Master ’ albums from Tidal. When played back directly from Tidal, My dac shows 24bit 96Khz sample rate. When the same album is played back through Roon, it drops the rate to 24bit 48Khz. All the settings limits are disabled and it is using exclusive mode. I have tried toggling off and on event driven and the work around. It is showing 96Khz as green and available. When I click on the transport icon It doesn’t show any downsampling of any kind. I have tried it with several ‘Master’ albums from Tidal and they are all the same.

Any ideas?

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Roon is not able to decode MQA files yet, so everything is absolutely perfect with your system.
The original file is 24/48 Khz, Tidal desktop app can decode it partially so you get 24/96 khz, and if send is it to a MQA certified DAC that same file would probably be a 24/192 khz.

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Roon does not support MQA decoding yet. so that why.

Have a look at the many MQA threads here for more details around this and ask any. Ore questions there. Let’s not start another MQA Tidal thread.

Sorry, yes I just read this elsewhere … Suddenly it’s all I can see lol

Has anyone verify that Tidal MQA is actually 24/192k via a MQA USB-DAC? If I understand correctly Tidal streams MQA at the maximum 24/96k, not limited to partial software decoding on the desktop app itself.

We won’t know untill it is officially announced. Personaly I believe and expect 24/96.
Anymore could undermine the whole bespoke MQA DAC market and I can’t see that happening, nor should it.
This is just my speculation though, for what it’s worth. (not A lot) lol
Chris

Yes, some of the files are 24/192 (or even higher I heard), my Meridian Explorer unfolds some of them upto 192khz.

I think it depends on the original file, MQA will make them all 24/48 or 24/44,1 depending on the resolution of the original, the decoder in a dac will then fully reverse the process upto it’s own maximum (192 in the case of the explorer).

The software decoder in the Tidal app will only unfold the resolution up to 88.1 or 96, and apparently doesn’t give the full benefit of correcting timing in the dac itself either. It still sounds really good though so a big step up from cd quality, even without an MQA dac.

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This indeed a good news, hope that Roon can do a full software decode of MQA when it is really to roll out.

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