"We are working hard to..." Ah, the standard utterly meaningless 'corporate' response. Do better Tidal. Thanks for highlighting this issue, good video.
@@tdmduc that's not gibberish Its self censoring And yea that was my initial reaction to the statement by golden sound and then he clarified later in the video
I hope you guys never let off the pressure from companies who support the kind of greed and malice MQA did. Too many in the tech space are too tolerant of the greedy bullshit companies pull over them. The audiophile community is one of the rare few who can actually vote with their wallet and make a tangible difference within a relatively short period of time because of how niche the space is. Keep up the good fight.
In my case, mostly are from Sony Music, and was very happy to see that in the last 2 weeks Universal send their replacements and they have no MQA anymore in my library. So, we have to wait until the record labels can or want to send their replacements for MQA... the record labels probably have to deliver certain period of time and number of files in their agreement with MQA
Thanks for killing the MQA scam! (they are mostly mastered with LOUDNESS WAR mastering, so even if it was not a scam in the first place, it would no make things better)
This is false. There's no difference in mastering for mqa. It was lossy compression with authentication. That's it. It's always been nothing but a scam.
Fair enough but I think they just need more time to sort it out. There is evidence that they are gathering the non MQA content. I imagine it's quite a task to replace it all.
@@rogerhuston8287how do you know that all of qobuz's files aren't just upsampled from whatever 6 bit recording was lying around on the studios harddrive?
I just recently switched to Tidal from Apple Music. Randomly got it in my head that certain things didn’t sound as good here and there. Honestly probably very little actual merit to this feeling, but this just validated my thoughts and I can’t go back. Until we meet again Tidal, we are all rooting for you
Good work as usual. I tried TIDAL again earlier this year, as the sometimes have music I like that isn't on Qobuz. Unfortunately I ran into what you describe here, that a lot of their music still only has the MQA versions, often only 16/44.1, which, as we know, is only about 13-bit.
This is exactly why I quit TIDAL a couple months ago. ROON was showing it was playing an MQA file, but TIDAL didn't show it as MQA. I was even surprised, does no one notice this? Thank you!
Tidal CEO left, their parent company are making redundancies across engineering and management roles, according to some sources they are focusing on other revenue streams and scaling back investment in the streaming platform.
I have seen that too. Tidal clearly has a few API keys one can access the service through. Depending on what API key one is using, different track quality and format can show as the highest there is to get. I have seen that while I could get a 24/96 file from the Tidal app, another one just got 24/48 or 16/48, and not seldom MQA. Last time I have seen though that things changed, and even an API key I used previously that gave me sub-par results, returned a higher resoluted FLAC file without MQA. So I think Tidal is working on it, but it appears to take time... not that surprising.
There is no doubt even some economic reality to it... re-requesting FLAC music after having had MQA might imply increased costs - something Tidal might just not be willing to pull off. Mistakes cost money and things perhaps can't be fixed too fast. That would leave us with the likely optimal choice - going with one of Tidal's competitors instead. I also recall some people claiming that Qobuz sounded a touch better than Tidal. I have never compared as it would require some work to do; but it would be cool to explore what it is down to, and how much of a difference there actually is.
Thanks so much for the great work you do! So much audio journalism seems like little more than advertising. Great to see real investigative journalism in the audio field
This video earned a subscriber. I love consumer advocacy and that you're working to hold companies accountable. I'm going to stick with Tidal a while to see how this plays out, and look forward to your next update.
I reckon Tidal has just turned off the MQA decoder in their app. So it will show up as FLAC, since MQA content is hidden within a FLAC container. I have both Qobuz and Tidal working together with my local collection in Roon. And a lot of 16/44.1 Tidal tracks still show up as MQA.
MQA have/had many different aspect and suffered from bad presentation, mainly from its creators and a lot of misunderstanding of how it works and what level of applications can have. To simplify, it is/was lossless in audio band and lossy for the ultrasonic part. Since Tidal dropped MQA by long time ago and its use for HD masters derived and replaced them with original HD Flacs, this kind of application it's no more significant. MQA was also applied to CD quality masters and delivered with 44.1KHz 16bit MQA files. In this case, MQA encoding was just a file flag telling to dac to use custom MQA upsample to 88.2KHz and antialias filter, just another type of dac filter and the PCM part is identical to normal CD Flacs. Since this equivalence, there wasn't any reason to completely replace files. Tidal removed just flag but some DAC, like the BluOS ones, still recognize the former MQA structure and activate upsampling and custom antialias filter. Like it or not, I find that the topic of MQA is generally treated superficially, as in this video.😎
marketing as a euphemism for what the folks behind the whole mqa thing did, seems too docile of a word, to say the absolute very least. thanks for keeping us enlightened
Very interesting. I’m in Australia and I’d switched back to Tidal when they dropped MQA but this raised my concerns again, however when I double checked the tracks you mention and random content from my library they don’t show as MQA on my dac, perhaps different libraries in different regions ??? Thanks for the follow up, keep em honest.
I'm a happy Tidal user, but my personal gripe with the service is how many duplicate albums there are. Go check out Taylor Swift's discography on Tidal and you'll get the same headache I have. It's frustrating because I want the highest quality I can get but with so many duplicates, it makes me worried there's some differences between the releases (there aren't). At this point, I just go by what's the latest remaster or what's just on the albums listing instead of "View All".
Sometimes, I am proud of my ears. I had doubt checking two albums of an Italian band some years ago. I know them very well, and I had chances to hear them while recording in the studio. At home, I ripped their CDs on my hard disk system. Then I started to use Tidal. Those files in MQA were quite worse than my ripped files. That feeling put me in a skeptical position against MQA. I discovered the truth many months after that strange feeling because of people reporting the real situation. Now I am using Qobuz. In no case now, streaming is playing worse than my local files.
@alexisrojas3584 If you use a VPN, you can get a more favourable conversion. Currently, Argentina is $2 a month, but you need a bank in that country. For me, Hungary still works, which is $3 a month.
It's actually a normal thing companies do to make their products more accessible in lower GDP countries. A $20 game on the Canadian Steam storefront could be $2 elsewhere, for instance.
@krakentortoise7531 not to this extreme and the very largest corps don't. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon either convert by the dollar or give only minimal discount. Argentina had their numerical pricing (so the amount of that currency) raised by 300%. They clearly don't know what they're doing.
I use Tidal a lot and really enjoy it, I've noticed that many albums that used to be MQA are now FLAC, I dont see much MQA content at all. I think they started ditching it about the same time they ditched 360 Reality Audio. There was an email announcement just a few months ago about it saying that the changes would take several months. I ditched Qobuz because its library is nowhere near as good as Tidal, the MQA thing isnt an issue for me.
Same, I've noticed Max on Tidal is much better than files on Spotify. I'm really liking the functionality of Tidal and the selection seems to have come a long way as well.
Even if they move back to real lossless for everything, how do we know they aren’t just converting the MQA to a lossless format and calling it lossless? It’s possible to check for individual tracks I suppose, but feasible to check everything?
For many tracks, the MQA flagging is in the audio data itself and so dacs will still detect this. Even if they did re-encode to break this though, the file can still be checked against other sources like band camp or Qobuz to see if they are indeed the same
@ yeah, I suppose the best we can do to hold them accountable is to check that Tidal’s lossless files are the same as on other platforms, as they (hopefully) add lossless versions. It’s clearly not possible to check all the tracks, but checking a wide range should be enough, perhaps
Well I would check some. Pink Floyd’s Animals 2018 remaster, that should be 24/192, is shown with “red” LED ( meaning 16 bit) in my A&K ACRO CA1000T using both embedded and downloaded Tidal (2.122). A&K says is a Tidal issue…
Good video! However i discovered something when i started using roon a couple month ago with tidal integrated. A lot of my tidal music was indeed still mqa yes. But, using the new function in roon to optimize/update my playlists it replaced like 80/90% of those songs with flac copies. That leaves me thinking flac DOES exist in bulk on tidal but not like you described on the most played track list of an artist. I dont know why they dont just delete the mqa copies to start with. Fyi my library in tidal consist over 15k songs. This might be interesting to test for yourself and maybe make a follow-up part 2 video. Interested to hear what you think. Cheers!
Apple Music on Windows isn't lossless so says my DAC ( no WASAPI support either ). That's why I turned to Tidal aaaand because it's cheaper than Spotify. Few percent of tracks I play show as MQA so I'm hoping they'll fix it eventually as Qobuz is unavailable in my country and more expensive than Tidal.
I wonder if his playback device had this Daft Punk track stored locally, cashed from times before MQA was dropped and that is why it keeps showing up as MQA
Not sure if you tried again, but if not I would consider submitting your request for information again. I have had only good responses from them in my previous interactions. For me they have been the best company to deal with out of any tech company, so I hope they continue to be that way.
Experienced this a few days ago, a list was playing and I noticed some songs had lesser quality. Checked it after a while and then saw the MQA mark. I thought they were still cleaning up their old MQA files. Thanks for your video!
They are... just last week Universal replaced a good number of old MQA with FLAC 24bit Sony Music 16bit catalog, 2L and others audiophile record labels hasn't send their replacements but they will at some point
This is exactly why I cancelled my Tidal in favor of Qobuz (despite the later's UI being inferior) because my Zen Dac was picking up these hidden MQA's. I'll go back when they are honest.
this is interesting and confirms what I already thought. I have a NAD C 3050 which has a glitch playing some mqa files . Bluesound/NAD confirm they know about this glitch which introduces noise to playback of mqa files but haven't fixed it . When tidal said they were dropping mqa this fixed my issue instantly , although in practice , every now and again I get the same digital noise on mqa(?) tracks ...v much hope tidal drop it completely , as I don't hold out much hope for NAD offering a workaround any time soon... which is ironic as i believe NAD or their parent company now own mqa..
In some ways, hi-res in general is a busted flush in my opinion. For the vast majority of even wired playback, people are getting resampled 24-48 and, barring remasters, nobody can tell the difference anyway (even A-B testing, which isn't how people listen to music). I'm guilty myself of pursuing bit-perfect playback, but it's nothing to do with the music quality; it's to get the correct light shining on my player. It's a net negative, because my daft arse is always slightly disappointed when I 'only' get a blue light for Redbook. I've even purchased hi-res PCM and DSD music at stupid prices. The only difference I can hear is that DSD is quiet and needs volume compensation. I think it's too late now, but I wish more time had been devoted to optimising bit-perfect high-quality Redbook FLAC streams (and players); I can actually hear a difference between CD and notionally identical CD-quality streams and it's quite obvious. And, of course, using the reduction in development and delivery costs to either bring the consumer price down or the artist revenue up.
I am a music lover but new to high-res streaming. Although I understand the fraise's los-les and lossee I wander what it actually means when referring to Streaming, even with the highest capabilities of 32 768 that I have sourly there must be some band width limitation or however it would be expressed.
I think they should just have a switch that you can select in App that only shows lossless music. I have the same thing. Loads of MQA content. How hard would it be to just be able to select your File type?
Mqa files are encoded in flac files. They would need a tool to read the mqa metadata in the files so it's not that simple. They should use the tool to search their library and show you if they are mqa files or if this video gets as viral as the last one send a notice to the labels to ask for lossless versions or the mqa version will be removed. That will be necessary if tidal loses too much customers but I doubt they will. They have had a steady amount even though out the mqa days. They have been doing lay offs and other stuff so people might boycott them
As audible as an IEM/HEADPHONE/SPEAKER can show, the more transparent they are the more you'll notice. But if using an less than 100 dollar IEM for example, you won't even notice the difference between 320kbps to Lossless and if you do it's probably the streaming codec not the actual quality of the file. Like for example the Spotify quality is fine at 320kbps but they're codec is trash.
so this is not a topic for future music so they will get to it at some point. But my take away is two positive things: I didn't even realize that my subscription is now half of what it used to be, nice!! And they fixed offline listening, I always had to login ever day on my dap for it to work and it would stop at 00:00, but that isn't an issue anymore. Don't know at what interval I have to login for offline to work, but it isn't as strict anymore.
What I don't understand is, are the 44.1 MQA tracks still being unfolded to 88.1 or higher? If not, are they basically just a lossy compressed version that's "better" than mp3 or ogg?
I ran all of my Tidal playlists through my Audirvana software and found only about 3% were MQA. Question comes down to when listening via my iPhone, which app Tidal or Qobuz sounds better.
I searched for the tracks mentioned here with iPhone 15 Pro Max and iFi Hip-Dac decoder (it decodes Mqa and show it with a different colour on the leds) but in my case they were all Flacs
Disappointing, I did side by side between Qobuz and Tidal a couple of years ago and could tell the MQA was no good. Had to ditch Qobuz as issues working with KEF active speakers. Went back to Tidal having heard they went FLAC, and it's integration is spot on. Shame it's not as transparent as they make out
From a quality perspective, arguably no, as it's better to do vol control via your own setup usually. But the feature is useful for some, so it depends on whether the potential small hit to quality is worth the usefulness of the feature for you. I always disable it personally
The fact that you have to use an analyser to check whether there is a difference just highlights that this a bunch of audionerds getting pissy over something they can't actually hear. You couldn't make this up - go outside - touch some grass - get a girlfriend - pop your headphones on and enjoy your music instead of worrying about bitrate. Talk about taking the enjoyment out of music! Get a grip ffs.
@The Headphone Show and ... Android - what about bitperfect sound in native tidal app on android devices (via usb)?! How long will it be resampling to 48khz? When will track numbers finally appear in playlists?
This is a bit of a frustrating issue, and one that is unfortunately down to Android rather than Tidal themselves. For the moment, the workaround is to use something like USB Audio Player Pro rather than the native Tidal app. BUT, A friend of mine is in close contact with one of the people actually working on the audio stack for android at google, and whilst there's no ETA or guarantee, he's been pushing things hard and it seems like we may hopefully see some more OS level remedies to this coming (hopefully) soon! Google was pretty much unaware of this being an actual issue, but that's no longer the case
@@GoldenSound Thx - I'm not sure if this is an Android-specific problem. Apps like UAPP or hiby music support bitperfect on every Android device. But only in the streaming service. Unfortunately, in such a scenario, you can't use downloaded tidal libraries offline, because they are only available in the native app. The only solution in this situation is to buy DAPs that have a modified Android system. Only then can the downloaded tidal offline files be played in bit perfect mode in the native tidal app. Bitperfect has been expected for many years and nothing has changed. People will soon fly to Mars, biperfect is a more difficult mission 😄
Small correction: the DJ addon is far from something good. It’s just a way to charge more money from people that want to use DJ software having Tidal as a source. Tidal is not providing ANY stems, this is, and always was, generated by the DJ software. The ONLY thing new now is that Tidal charges more if you wanna DJ with it. They are not providing ANYTHING new or extra to DJs that they didn’t already provide since always.
MQA is not actually "lossy" because they said when you converted it to MQA then BACK to flac, you lost data (headphones guy). Well I'm not converting in tidal I'm STREAMING so no CONVERSION so no LOST DATA. LEL. Mqa is 16-bit file size with 24-bit sound. Thats not bad it's easier on streaming service because huge bandwidth with 24/48+khz files.
I have a Chord Mojo which never decoded MQA. Chord never programmed their DACs to use it so they never payed royalties to them . HA HA. If an extremely well respected company doesn’t want to use MQA , does it make you think ? There was an extremely lot of marketing behind it. And then it Fails . Ummm ?😮
The level of incompetence and bad decision making on the part of Tidal is monumental. Instead of fixing an issue they create more issues in their attempt to fix the original one.
One thing I can't work out is Tidal through USB Audio Player Pro never appears as MQA on the DAC for me. Not sure if this is a quirk or UAPP or how I have it set up or if it's actually somehow serving me FLAC?
@GoldenSound It weirdly doesn't show as MQA even on things like the non hi-res Daft Punk example and Opeth stuff that does appear as MQA when I use the Tidal app on PC with the same DAC though. I thought maybe I had some setting that was disabling MQA playback or something but couldn't work it out.
@@adamarstall7 It may depend on your DAC. Which one are you using? Since the stuff is in 'folded' MQA form, DACs that are just MQA renderers and not full MQA decoders may not detect it, since MQA renderers only take MQA audio that has had the first unfold/core decode done by the player or streamer. But also, there are a few different ways that MQA is/can be detected which differ from DAC to DAC. On the dCS LINA for instance one track doesn't get detected as MQA but on the SMSL RAW-DAC1 it does.
@GoldenSound I'm using a fiio KA17 which I think is a full decoder. I wish MQA didn't exist so I could have confidence in what I'm listening to haha. Thanks for your responses.
"We are working hard to..." Ah, the standard utterly meaningless 'corporate' response. Do better Tidal. Thanks for highlighting this issue, good video.
Qobuz catalog is meh sucking with tidal and Apple Music
Tidal isn't claiming "you won't hear the difference", they're claiming "it's bit-perfect from the master" -- and they're lying.
Videos like this are extremely important for consumers and keeps the services on their toes. A genuine thanks for this !
I agree
Excellent, excellent content. This channel deserves way more subscriptions
"Mqa went bankrupt"
Holy fucqk, that fills my heart with joy
It didn't. It's now owned by the people of Bluesound. Read some updates before cramming out jibberish.
How could you miss that?
@@tdmduc that's not gibberish
Its self censoring
And yea that was my initial reaction to the statement by golden sound and then he clarified later in the video
@@tdmducThey did, actually, go bankrupt. They just got bought out after filing for Chapter 11.
Back in April of 2023, MQA Ltd. entered into administration - the British equivalent to filing for bankruptcy.
I hope you guys never let off the pressure from companies who support the kind of greed and malice MQA did. Too many in the tech space are too tolerant of the greedy bullshit companies pull over them. The audiophile community is one of the rare few who can actually vote with their wallet and make a tangible difference within a relatively short period of time because of how niche the space is. Keep up the good fight.
Excellent work! The Nyan Cat bit was hysterical!
In my case, mostly are from Sony Music, and was very happy to see that in the last 2 weeks Universal send their replacements and they have no MQA anymore in my library.
So, we have to wait until the record labels can or want to send their replacements for MQA... the record labels probably have to deliver certain period of time and number of files in their agreement with MQA
Thanks for killing the MQA scam! (they are mostly mastered with LOUDNESS WAR mastering, so even if it was not a scam in the first place, it would no make things better)
This is false. There's no difference in mastering for mqa. It was lossy compression with authentication. That's it. It's always been nothing but a scam.
You are not well informed
You need to read up on the difference between dynamic and digital compression.
@@ornorra Without providing the missing information, this comment is worthless.
@@cowboyflipflopped Exactly like the original comment then...😂
Fair enough but I think they just need more time to sort it out. There is evidence that they are gathering the non MQA content. I imagine it's quite a task to replace it all.
I'll stay with Qobuz. I was a Tidal user for 6 years, until the MQA kerfuffle, but I left 2 years back.
is it considered better ?
@OrionHellscapeOrion of you want bit perfect lossless, yes.
@@rogerhuston8287how do you know that all of qobuz's files aren't just upsampled from whatever 6 bit recording was lying around on the studios harddrive?
Qobuz sounds the best, but their library not so great
Qobuz library is lacking
I totally agree, thanks for explaining!
I just recently switched to Tidal from Apple Music. Randomly got it in my head that certain things didn’t sound as good here and there. Honestly probably very little actual merit to this feeling, but this just validated my thoughts and I can’t go back. Until we meet again Tidal, we are all rooting for you
Good work as usual. I tried TIDAL again earlier this year, as the sometimes have music I like that isn't on Qobuz. Unfortunately I ran into what you describe here, that a lot of their music still only has the MQA versions, often only 16/44.1, which, as we know, is only about 13-bit.
Which at minimum is double the bit depth of the best recordings made in the first 80 years of recorded music.
If it's 13bit it would be 13/44.1
I'm okay with it. The service is still a better value than Spotify.
A great, clear update.
Great work. Sounds like the beginning of a great class action lawsuit.
This is exactly why I quit TIDAL a couple months ago. ROON was showing it was playing an MQA file, but TIDAL didn't show it as MQA. I was even surprised, does no one notice this? Thank you!
Tidal CEO left, their parent company are making redundancies across engineering and management roles, according to some sources they are focusing on other revenue streams and scaling back investment in the streaming platform.
I hope it doesn’t go down the toilet.
I’ve liked Tidal so far and if it goes the way of Spotify I’ll have to find another option.
What? Tidal didn't respond? Shocking!
I have seen that too. Tidal clearly has a few API keys one can access the service through. Depending on what API key one is using, different track quality and format can show as the highest there is to get. I have seen that while I could get a 24/96 file from the Tidal app, another one just got 24/48 or 16/48, and not seldom MQA. Last time I have seen though that things changed, and even an API key I used previously that gave me sub-par results, returned a higher resoluted FLAC file without MQA. So I think Tidal is working on it, but it appears to take time... not that surprising.
There is no doubt even some economic reality to it... re-requesting FLAC music after having had MQA might imply increased costs - something Tidal might just not be willing to pull off. Mistakes cost money and things perhaps can't be fixed too fast. That would leave us with the likely optimal choice - going with one of Tidal's competitors instead.
I also recall some people claiming that Qobuz sounded a touch better than Tidal. I have never compared as it would require some work to do; but it would be cool to explore what it is down to, and how much of a difference there actually is.
@@mk0x55 Do it, you won't hear a difference
GREAT revue! Thank you, so much for informing, and advising me!
Thanks so much for the great work you do! So much audio journalism seems like little more than advertising. Great to see real investigative journalism in the audio field
This video earned a subscriber. I love consumer advocacy and that you're working to hold companies accountable.
I'm going to stick with Tidal a while to see how this plays out, and look forward to your next update.
Oh boy, here we go again!
*grabs popcorn*
😂
Very informative, thanks for keeping us in the loop.
I was still on the Tidal trial plan. Thanks for making this video.
GoldenSound is a boss! I've always been surprised by the number of people/companies who bought into the mqa myth.
I reckon Tidal has just turned off the MQA decoder in their app. So it will show up as FLAC, since MQA content is hidden within a FLAC container. I have both Qobuz and Tidal working together with my local collection in Roon. And a lot of 16/44.1 Tidal tracks still show up as MQA.
MQA have/had many different aspect and suffered from bad presentation, mainly from its creators and a lot of misunderstanding of how it works and what level of applications can have. To simplify, it is/was lossless in audio band and lossy for the ultrasonic part. Since Tidal dropped MQA by long time ago and its use for HD masters derived and replaced them with original HD Flacs, this kind of application it's no more significant.
MQA was also applied to CD quality masters and delivered with 44.1KHz 16bit MQA files. In this case, MQA encoding was just a file flag telling to dac to use custom MQA upsample to 88.2KHz and antialias filter, just another type of dac filter and the PCM part is identical to normal CD Flacs.
Since this equivalence, there wasn't any reason to completely replace files. Tidal removed just flag but some DAC, like the BluOS ones, still recognize the former MQA structure and activate upsampling and custom antialias filter.
Like it or not, I find that the topic of MQA is generally treated superficially, as in this video.😎
That was great. Please keep making content like this.
marketing as a euphemism for what the folks behind the whole mqa thing did, seems too docile of a word, to say the absolute very least.
thanks for keeping us enlightened
Thank you for all your work I really appreciate what you do
Thanks, more people should know about this so they can make informed decision
Very interesting. I’m in Australia and I’d switched back to Tidal when they dropped MQA but this raised my concerns again, however when I double checked the tracks you mention and random content from my library they don’t show as MQA on my dac, perhaps different libraries in different regions ??? Thanks for the follow up, keep em honest.
What dac did you test with
@ Topping E50 which is MQA capable and used to indicate MQA content when it was still available but so far can’t see any in my Tidal library.
I'm a happy Tidal user, but my personal gripe with the service is how many duplicate albums there are. Go check out Taylor Swift's discography on Tidal and you'll get the same headache I have. It's frustrating because I want the highest quality I can get but with so many duplicates, it makes me worried there's some differences between the releases (there aren't). At this point, I just go by what's the latest remaster or what's just on the albums listing instead of "View All".
Sometimes, I am proud of my ears. I had doubt checking two albums of an Italian band some years ago. I know them very well, and I had chances to hear them while recording in the studio. At home, I ripped their CDs on my hard disk system.
Then I started to use Tidal. Those files in MQA were quite worse than my ripped files. That feeling put me in a skeptical position against MQA.
I discovered the truth many months after that strange feeling because of people reporting the real situation.
Now I am using Qobuz. In no case now, streaming is playing worse than my local files.
It depends on the region! There are FLAC files without MQA in my country. I did download some files to test it on Deltawave and it was fully green.
The best thing about tidal is their inability to currency convert. If you know, you know.
Please elaborate
@alexisrojas3584 If you use a VPN, you can get a more favourable conversion. Currently, Argentina is $2 a month, but you need a bank in that country. For me, Hungary still works, which is $3 a month.
It's actually a normal thing companies do to make their products more accessible in lower GDP countries. A $20 game on the Canadian Steam storefront could be $2 elsewhere, for instance.
Regional pricing is a thing for ALL streaming services dude. Even Steam does it.
@krakentortoise7531 not to this extreme and the very largest corps don't. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon either convert by the dollar or give only minimal discount. Argentina had their numerical pricing (so the amount of that currency) raised by 300%. They clearly don't know what they're doing.
I use Tidal a lot and really enjoy it, I've noticed that many albums that used to be MQA are now FLAC, I dont see much MQA content at all. I think they started ditching it about the same time they ditched 360 Reality Audio. There was an email announcement just a few months ago about it saying that the changes would take several months. I ditched Qobuz because its library is nowhere near as good as Tidal, the MQA thing isnt an issue for me.
Same, I've noticed Max on Tidal is much better than files on Spotify. I'm really liking the functionality of Tidal and the selection seems to have come a long way as well.
This is the same for me as well. And Tidal's tools to discover new music are way better than Qobuz.
GS still has a hard on against Tidal
Even if they move back to real lossless for everything, how do we know they aren’t just converting the MQA to a lossless format and calling it lossless? It’s possible to check for individual tracks I suppose, but feasible to check everything?
For many tracks, the MQA flagging is in the audio data itself and so dacs will still detect this. Even if they did re-encode to break this though, the file can still be checked against other sources like band camp or Qobuz to see if they are indeed the same
@ yeah, I suppose the best we can do to hold them accountable is to check that Tidal’s lossless files are the same as on other platforms, as they (hopefully) add lossless versions. It’s clearly not possible to check all the tracks, but checking a wide range should be enough, perhaps
Well I would check some.
Pink Floyd’s Animals 2018 remaster, that should be 24/192, is shown with “red” LED ( meaning 16 bit) in my A&K ACRO CA1000T using both embedded and downloaded Tidal (2.122). A&K says is a Tidal issue…
For some reason my favorite tracks on Tidal are mostly in FLAC. And the sound difference is minimal (if any) with TOTL headphones.
My Eversolo DMP-A8 still shows many tracks as MQA. I find those tracks to be too loud and "in your face" compared to standard FLAC.
They are just louder. That's all
Keep recommending competition!!!
shame...shame..shame.. Really thank you Golden once again!!!
Good video! However i discovered something when i started using roon a couple month ago with tidal integrated. A lot of my tidal music was indeed still mqa yes. But, using the new function in roon to optimize/update my playlists it replaced like 80/90% of those songs with flac copies. That leaves me thinking flac DOES exist in bulk on tidal but not like you described on the most played track list of an artist. I dont know why they dont just delete the mqa copies to start with. Fyi my library in tidal consist over 15k songs.
This might be interesting to test for yourself and maybe make a follow-up part 2 video. Interested to hear what you think. Cheers!
Apple Music on Windows isn't lossless so says my DAC ( no WASAPI support either ). That's why I turned to Tidal aaaand because it's cheaper than Spotify. Few percent of tracks I play show as MQA so I'm hoping they'll fix it eventually as Qobuz is unavailable in my country and more expensive than Tidal.
It's lossless it's just being resampled. They are completely different things.
I wonder if his playback device had this Daft Punk track stored locally, cashed from times before MQA was dropped and that is why it keeps showing up as MQA
Nope, i just tried it
Not how it works
I have DAC with MQA decoder and all the music I was listening the MQA decoding light never turned on 🤷♂️
What dac is it
S.M.S.L SU-1
I have just tested Daft Punk "Get lucky" (all 3 versions) and no MQA indicator 🤷♂️
What player are you using with your dac?
WiiM Ultra and WiiM Mini, both are network high-res audio streamers and support MQA format natively
Golden shedding some weight. Love to see it!
Not sure if you tried again, but if not I would consider submitting your request for information again.
I have had only good responses from them in my previous interactions.
For me they have been the best company to deal with out of any tech company, so I hope they continue to be that way.
Experienced this a few days ago, a list was playing and I noticed some songs had lesser quality. Checked it after a while and then saw the MQA mark. I thought they were still cleaning up their old MQA files. Thanks for your video!
They are... just last week Universal replaced a good number of old MQA with FLAC 24bit
Sony Music 16bit catalog, 2L and others audiophile record labels hasn't send their replacements but they will at some point
Although I agree with the premise you should get what paid for, very few people can hear the difference is my hypothesis, lab tests not withstanding
This is exactly why I cancelled my Tidal in favor of Qobuz (despite the later's UI being inferior) because my Zen Dac was picking up these hidden MQA's. I'll go back when they are honest.
this is interesting and confirms what I already thought.
I have a NAD C 3050 which has a glitch playing some mqa files . Bluesound/NAD confirm they know about this glitch which introduces noise to playback of mqa files but haven't fixed it . When tidal said they were dropping mqa this fixed my issue instantly , although in practice , every now and again I get the same digital noise on mqa(?) tracks ...v much hope tidal drop it completely , as I don't hold out much hope for NAD offering a workaround any time soon... which is ironic as i believe NAD or their parent company now own mqa..
In some ways, hi-res in general is a busted flush in my opinion. For the vast majority of even wired playback, people are getting resampled 24-48 and, barring remasters, nobody can tell the difference anyway (even A-B testing, which isn't how people listen to music).
I'm guilty myself of pursuing bit-perfect playback, but it's nothing to do with the music quality; it's to get the correct light shining on my player. It's a net negative, because my daft arse is always slightly disappointed when I 'only' get a blue light for Redbook. I've even purchased hi-res PCM and DSD music at stupid prices. The only difference I can hear is that DSD is quiet and needs volume compensation.
I think it's too late now, but I wish more time had been devoted to optimising bit-perfect high-quality Redbook FLAC streams (and players); I can actually hear a difference between CD and notionally identical CD-quality streams and it's quite obvious.
And, of course, using the reduction in development and delivery costs to either bring the consumer price down or the artist revenue up.
Closing your ticket without replying tells me all I need to know about Tidal. I'm one potential customer who definitely won't be subscribing.
I am a music lover but new to high-res streaming. Although I understand the fraise's los-les and lossee I wander what it actually means when referring to Streaming, even with the highest capabilities of 32 768 that I have sourly there must be some band width limitation or however it would be expressed.
Without having a full MQA decoder/using Roon, is there any other way to identify if a track is still MQA or not?
I think they should just have a switch that you can select in App that only shows lossless music. I have the same thing. Loads of MQA content. How hard would it be to just be able to select your File type?
Mqa files are encoded in flac files. They would need a tool to read the mqa metadata in the files so it's not that simple. They should use the tool to search their library and show you if they are mqa files or if this video gets as viral as the last one send a notice to the labels to ask for lossless versions or the mqa version will be removed. That will be necessary if tidal loses too much customers but I doubt they will. They have had a steady amount even though out the mqa days. They have been doing lay offs and other stuff so people might boycott them
Cameron are you no longer going to publish videos on your own channel? I was hoping for an HQ Player upsampling deep dive video. Thanks!
How audible is the difference between true lossless and MQA?
As audible as an IEM/HEADPHONE/SPEAKER can show, the more transparent they are the more you'll notice. But if using an less than 100 dollar IEM for example, you won't even notice the difference between 320kbps to Lossless and if you do it's probably the streaming codec not the actual quality of the file. Like for example the Spotify quality is fine at 320kbps but they're codec is trash.
Just completed my second Golden-inspired Tidal cancellation. No third chance is likely, regardless of their announcements. Thanks.
so this is not a topic for future music so they will get to it at some point. But my take away is two positive things: I didn't even realize that my subscription is now half of what it used to be, nice!! And they fixed offline listening, I always had to login ever day on my dap for it to work and it would stop at 00:00, but that isn't an issue anymore. Don't know at what interval I have to login for offline to work, but it isn't as strict anymore.
What I don't understand is, are the 44.1 MQA tracks still being unfolded to 88.1 or higher? If not, are they basically just a lossy compressed version that's "better" than mp3 or ogg?
With finite samplerate and precision it will never be lossless anyway.
Speaking of which, @goldensound are you still doing anything on your channel?
I ran all of my Tidal playlists through my Audirvana software and found only about 3% were MQA. Question comes down to when listening via my iPhone, which app Tidal or Qobuz sounds better.
Any chance for a review of Sennheiser Momentum TWS 4?
Im not complaining about a 4 dollar per month subscription, and also not getting a 15 dollar per month Roon subscription to "fix" said issue.
I searched for the tracks mentioned here with iPhone 15 Pro Max and iFi Hip-Dac decoder (it decodes Mqa and show it with a different colour on the leds) but in my case they were all Flacs
Disappointing, I did side by side between Qobuz and Tidal a couple of years ago and could tell the MQA was no good. Had to ditch Qobuz as issues working with KEF active speakers. Went back to Tidal having heard they went FLAC, and it's integration is spot on. Shame it's not as transparent as they make out
Is not about not being transparent. TIDAL deleted the MQA metadata reader. UAPP can't even read them either
Can I ask where you get those framed mini album art on the back wall? thanks for the info, hoping Spotify will have lossless out one day.
I hope to see your review of HiFiRose RS130 streamer soon...
I JUST paid for a subscription last night, too. Bummer.
Hey golden question, should I keep volume normalization on in tidal?
From a quality perspective, arguably no, as it's better to do vol control via your own setup usually.
But the feature is useful for some, so it depends on whether the potential small hit to quality is worth the usefulness of the feature for you. I always disable it personally
The fact that you have to use an analyser to check whether there is a difference just highlights that this a bunch of audionerds getting pissy over something they can't actually hear.
You couldn't make this up - go outside - touch some grass - get a girlfriend - pop your headphones on and enjoy your music instead of worrying about bitrate. Talk about taking the enjoyment out of music! Get a grip ffs.
Ones Spotify comes out with lossless, Goodbye to all the other ones.
Not really. It will be very expensive.
@ how much do you think it will be?
when i use tidal on UAPP on my phone it always shows flac
@The Headphone Show
and ... Android - what about bitperfect sound in native tidal app on android devices (via usb)?! How long will it be resampling to 48khz? When will track numbers finally appear in playlists?
This is a bit of a frustrating issue, and one that is unfortunately down to Android rather than Tidal themselves. For the moment, the workaround is to use something like USB Audio Player Pro rather than the native Tidal app.
BUT, A friend of mine is in close contact with one of the people actually working on the audio stack for android at google, and whilst there's no ETA or guarantee, he's been pushing things hard and it seems like we may hopefully see some more OS level remedies to this coming (hopefully) soon!
Google was pretty much unaware of this being an actual issue, but that's no longer the case
@@GoldenSound Thx - I'm not sure if this is an Android-specific problem. Apps like UAPP or hiby music support bitperfect on every Android device. But only in the streaming service. Unfortunately, in such a scenario, you can't use downloaded tidal libraries offline, because they are only available in the native app. The only solution in this situation is to buy DAPs that have a modified Android system. Only then can the downloaded tidal offline files be played in bit perfect mode in the native tidal app. Bitperfect has been expected for many years and nothing has changed. People will soon fly to Mars, biperfect is a more difficult mission 😄
How about dsd and pcm hi-res(48/24, 96/24, etc)? I know its lossless and useful for recording and mixing, but why exist for listener?
What happens if I listen to a disguised MQA track but my DAC doesn't have MQA ? What will be the quality of the audio stream?
So did you actually listen to any music in your Tidal vs Qobuz comparison nine months ago when you said Tidal was the best?
Anyone know whether the
EverSolo DMP-A6 Master Edition
is a core MQA decoder/renderer?
Also, where can I find hi res tracks
to download?
Small correction: the DJ addon is far from something good. It’s just a way to charge more money from people that want to use DJ software having Tidal as a source.
Tidal is not providing ANY stems, this is, and always was, generated by the DJ software. The ONLY thing new now is that Tidal charges more if you wanna DJ with it. They are not providing ANYTHING new or extra to DJs that they didn’t already provide since always.
MQA is not actually "lossy" because they said when you converted it to MQA then BACK to flac, you lost data (headphones guy). Well I'm not converting in tidal I'm STREAMING so no CONVERSION so no LOST DATA. LEL. Mqa is 16-bit file size with 24-bit sound. Thats not bad it's easier on streaming service because huge bandwidth with 24/48+khz files.
Am I weird for only purchasing in WAV, flac if WAV not available.
DSD my dude
I have a Chord Mojo which never decoded MQA. Chord never programmed their DACs to use it so they never payed royalties to them . HA HA. If an extremely well respected company doesn’t want to use MQA , does it make you think ? There was an extremely lot of marketing behind it. And then it Fails . Ummm ?😮
would my wiim home software show info correctly?
The level of incompetence and bad decision making on the part of Tidal is monumental. Instead of fixing an issue they create more issues in their attempt to fix the original one.
it is kinda theyre signature move
@@brunonjezic6208hahah yeah
Lots of tracks are still MQA and is 100% decoded by Roon even now
At the current speed and bandwidht of the internet I just can not understand the use of lossy compression...
I like Qobuz because I can buy lossless tracks and play them offline
One thing I can't work out is Tidal through USB Audio Player Pro never appears as MQA on the DAC for me. Not sure if this is a quirk or UAPP or how I have it set up or if it's actually somehow serving me FLAC?
It'll only do that if the content is actually MQA. Whilst there is still some hidden MQA stuff, the majority is now genuine lossless it seems
@GoldenSound It weirdly doesn't show as MQA even on things like the non hi-res Daft Punk example and Opeth stuff that does appear as MQA when I use the Tidal app on PC with the same DAC though. I thought maybe I had some setting that was disabling MQA playback or something but couldn't work it out.
@@adamarstall7 It may depend on your DAC. Which one are you using?
Since the stuff is in 'folded' MQA form, DACs that are just MQA renderers and not full MQA decoders may not detect it, since MQA renderers only take MQA audio that has had the first unfold/core decode done by the player or streamer.
But also, there are a few different ways that MQA is/can be detected which differ from DAC to DAC. On the dCS LINA for instance one track doesn't get detected as MQA but on the SMSL RAW-DAC1 it does.
@GoldenSound I'm using a fiio KA17 which I think is a full decoder. I wish MQA didn't exist so I could have confidence in what I'm listening to haha. Thanks for your responses.
Sadly, Qobuz is not available in my country. 😢
You could try using a VPN.
It's just new marketing, now you can buy a MQA DAC to check whether or not you are streaming poor quality audio
😅
I was just considering going back to tidal before I saw this. Thanks for the heads up!
Just returned to Tidal and honestly love it. Files are great as are the selections and rec's.
It's unfortunate, mostly because Qobuz's library is much weaker than Tidal's
I have noticed that some tracks sound like grap and others very good, that's life boys and its perfect.
Nice Video