Thursday, May 11, 2017

TIDAL Streaming & MQA 11May17

I was given a 90 day trial to TIDAL's HiFi service at the audio show I recently attended in Denver. I've been testing it and researching their distinctions from Spotify. #1 is that TIDAL is mostly lossless FLAC 44.1KHz/16bit streaming (1411Kbps) vs Spotify's MP3/AAC streaming (320Kbps). Music quality is the key and Spotify's catalog is only a smidge larger and social media integration tighter/better (I don't care). While TIDAL has had issues and I love Ariana Grande's impressions of these on SNL - it is better a better quality service once the music starts. In fact, TIDAL is now streaming MQA (96KHz/24bit) for the HiFi subscriber (and I am able to test that too). The library is somewhat limited but TIDAL has decent access to masters because they offer sales of HighDef music of that resolution and can therefore create the MQA source files needed. They've integrated MQA decoding into their desktop apps but not iOS or Android apps yet - so my TIDAL app on my DP-X1 doesn't stream MQA to me despite the MQA decode available on-board. When my desktop is streaming MQA it displays "Master" instead of "HiFi" in the quality icon in the lower right of the screen. Can I tell the difference? - Maybe, the Wavves V album is available in MQA and is very good - think Green Day but from SoCal - maybe it's me and punk pop rather than Q. Hmmm... 

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