Computer Audio Asylum: Interesting.... A Tidal Player problem? by AbeCollins

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.