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Encountered my first MQA recording on Tidal!

206.255.206.246
Posted on June 24, 2017 at 17:05:38
E-Stat
Audiophile

Posts: 37645
Joined: May 12, 2000
Contributor
  Since: April 5, 2002
 Wouldn't play.

This is with my Win7 server using the Tidal application to drive the in house system. I wanted to play a new Paramore album out by the pool, but got an error message:

TIDAL requires you to set you system sound settings in Control Panel to "16bit, 44100 (CD quality") in order to play tracks correctly.

You mean like the way it's already set?



That's the sum of my MQA experience. :)

 

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Interesting.... A Tidal Player problem?, posted on June 24, 2017 at 19:42:12
AbeCollins
Audiophile

Posts: 46293
Location: USA
Joined: June 22, 2001
Contributor
  Since: February 2, 2002
 What happens if you disable exclusive control and exclusive mode? Even with the latest Tidal player update, I'm having problems if I enable exclusive mode. It hisses when I play a track. Disable exclusive mode and all is fine. This is on the Mac. This started happening in Tidal a couple updates ago and the problem persists. I'm not sure if similar issues are present with the Tidal player on Windows.

Some other interesting tidbits...

I tried Tidal on Mac and manually set Audio Midi Setup to some random setting like 176400/24-bit. The music plays fine and it doesn't matter what sample rate I choose in Audio Midi Setup. Regardless of the true sample rate of the stream the music just plays. I'm not sure if Tidal is totally bypassing those settings or just using what I choose in Audio Midi Setup, possibly upsampling within Core Audio. That was with the Tidal app directly.

I also I tried Tidal within the Roon player. If I choose a different sample rate stream, like MQA vs standard Hifi (CD), I can watch the settings within Audio Midi Setup change in real time. If I'm playing a "Hifi" CD quality stream it goes 44100. If I stream a "Master" (MQA) it changes to 48,000.

Playing a 44.1KHz "Hifi" (CD) stream in Tidal. Doesn't care about Audio Midi Setup settings.

Playing a Tidal "Master" 48KHz stream from within Roon. Roon forces Audio Midi Setup to change to 48KHz. So I guess this means that Roon is doing auto sample rate switching. Audio Midi Setup settings match what is shown in Roon signal path which also matches what I see on the DAC display.



 

Thanks for the suggestion, posted on June 25, 2017 at 06:07:55
E-Stat
Audiophile

Posts: 37645
Joined: May 12, 2000
Contributor
  Since: April 5, 2002
 Oddly enough, if I turn Exclusive mode off entirely, I get another unhappy message saying something to the effect of "Doesn't support exclusive mode". Huh? It's off! Then I enabled it again, but did not elect to choose the priority option.

Now it works.

Quick comparison using "Hard Times" on the new Paramore album, I find that the MQA version is measurably a touch louder on peaks - 0.8 db.

I'll need to play around more with that. :)

 

RE: Thanks for the suggestion, posted on June 30, 2017 at 03:36:18
zacster
Audiophile

Posts: 2179
Location: NYC
Joined: November 22, 2003
 You would think that there would be a document on Tidal that tells you what settings to use based on your hardware. There aren't that many combinations. At least it would be easy on a Mac, I guess Windows itself has a billion different setups.

 

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