MQA arrives on Tidal
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vln
Shuns mooks. And MQA.
Ironically, if someone else showed Julf's spectra, he would be the first to claim that it's inaudible, being at >20kHz and -90dB.
radamel
Music Fiend
Ironically, if someone else showed Julf's spectra, he would be the first to claim that it's inaudible, being at >20kHz and -90dB.
Being MQA it's very important for some people to "understand" what's "really" happening.
If it's audible or not it's beside the point.
If it sounds better or not also seems to be beside the point.
Stunsworth
pfm Member
On a Mac at least it allows the playback system to change the bit depth and sample rate on the fly - so automatic switching between say 16/44.1, 24/88.2, 24/96.
vln
Shuns mooks. And MQA.
Thx, Mark - I've got it sorted now. I was labouring under the false impression that the software upgrade of the Tidal app would only affect the DAC of the computer which feeds the headphone output, and that the digital output signal is still fully encoded (with the only indication of MQA being that it's 24/44.1 or 24/48).
Anyway, this is what is coming out of my Auralic Aries, wich obviously didn't have any software upgrade re MQA. When I connect my MacBook to my (non-MQA) DAC with the necessary settings in the Tidal desktop app, I can see 24/96 or 24/88.2 coming out, indicating that it's unfolded but not decoded (obviously, due to the non-MQA nature of my DAC).
The only software glitch I have noticed so far is that I can't always switch from MQA to non-MQA (or back) by ticking the respective box in the Tidal desktop app - sometimes it's just continues, stuck at whatever it was. (Not that this is a huge issue)
And my impressions so far? I am reserving judgment until I receive my Mytek that can do the whole MQA enchilada, but let's say I'm not bored.
Julf
Facts are our friends
Ironically, if someone else showed Julf's spectra, he would be the first to claim that it's inaudible, being at >20kHz and -90dB.
No, I would just point out their inability to read a graph.
onlyconnect
pfm Member
Well I am struggling a bit how to assess this.
I've got an Explorer 2 and Senn HD600 headphones.
I've set it up with Tidal so I get the blue light on the Explorer 2 for "Master" tracks.
Subjectively I hear a difference with the MQA tracks. For example, Born under Punches from Remain in Light by Talking Heads. This is quite a busy track with different instruments, sounds coming at you from all over the sound field. The MQA version seems to accentuate the difference between these sounds so that they seem more distinct from each other. When you get the "wooh" vocals at around 14, 16, seconds in, they seem more immediate and dramatic. Vocals in general seem smoother.
However I haven't found a way to do an A/B test easily without knowing which is which. May be best to insert an A/D/A loop as in the Meyer/Moran setup. It's also particularly hard to match volume with Tidal as it seems to reset the volume to max from time to time, which can be a shock when listening to cans plugged directly into the Explorer 2!
I did capture a couple of tracks directly onto a digital recorder at 24/96. I carefully extracted a section from Joni Mitchell's All I Want (from Blue). I used MQA for one sample, and "hi-fi" for the other. I can't easily differentiate my recordings on an ABX test.
Tim
I've got an Explorer 2 and Senn HD600 headphones.
I've set it up with Tidal so I get the blue light on the Explorer 2 for "Master" tracks.
Subjectively I hear a difference with the MQA tracks. For example, Born under Punches from Remain in Light by Talking Heads. This is quite a busy track with different instruments, sounds coming at you from all over the sound field. The MQA version seems to accentuate the difference between these sounds so that they seem more distinct from each other. When you get the "wooh" vocals at around 14, 16, seconds in, they seem more immediate and dramatic. Vocals in general seem smoother.
However I haven't found a way to do an A/B test easily without knowing which is which. May be best to insert an A/D/A loop as in the Meyer/Moran setup. It's also particularly hard to match volume with Tidal as it seems to reset the volume to max from time to time, which can be a shock when listening to cans plugged directly into the Explorer 2!
I did capture a couple of tracks directly onto a digital recorder at 24/96. I carefully extracted a section from Joni Mitchell's All I Want (from Blue). I used MQA for one sample, and "hi-fi" for the other. I can't easily differentiate my recordings on an ABX test.
Tim
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
FWIW I'm not at all suprised that people can hear differences between versions. And which one they prefer is a matter for them to decide.
My interest is in why they differ, and which might be closest to the *source* version that got fed into the MQA encoder.
BTW About half of the Joni Michell CDs I have are HDCD ones. They sound distinctly poorer when played without an HDCD decode. But aren't all clearly marked as HDCD.
The 'Travelogue' 2CD set also sounds to me like it is peak squashed a la HDCD. However when I tested it some time ago it didn't seem to have any HDCD codes. Nor did it light the HDCD led on a player that has a decoder.
The 'Stereophile' review said it is an HDCD IIRC.
I'm wondering if the copy I have was HDCD encoded, and then some clever person who was in the chain 'tweaked' the sample sequence before it got onto the UK copies of the CDs. Thus losing the HDCD markers.
Never have got to the bottom of this.
My interest is in why they differ, and which might be closest to the *source* version that got fed into the MQA encoder.
BTW About half of the Joni Michell CDs I have are HDCD ones. They sound distinctly poorer when played without an HDCD decode. But aren't all clearly marked as HDCD.
The 'Travelogue' 2CD set also sounds to me like it is peak squashed a la HDCD. However when I tested it some time ago it didn't seem to have any HDCD codes. Nor did it light the HDCD led on a player that has a decoder.
The 'Stereophile' review said it is an HDCD IIRC.
I'm wondering if the copy I have was HDCD encoded, and then some clever person who was in the chain 'tweaked' the sample sequence before it got onto the UK copies of the CDs. Thus losing the HDCD markers.
Never have got to the bottom of this.
onlyconnect
pfm Member
Mine too.
Speculating ... if Meridian has found a way of improving digital replay I presume others will copy it. If.
Tim
Once again, Meridian claim to have found a way of improving digital replay. Some think it works, others do not. Some think that the technology is a form of filtering or EQ fudge; others a form of closet DRM.
The IP of that copyrighted technology has been transferred to a separate company called MQA. MQA is being marketed and licenced to any manufacturer that is prepared to pay to implement it in content, in software or in hardware.
Why copy (and risk a legal claim) if you can licence? If you can improve that is another matter.
Stunsworth
pfm Member
Just under 200 MQA albums have been added since the weekend. Since they're unlikely to be completely new masters I'm guessing that someone - Tidal or MQA - have pushed existing masters through the MQA encoder.
Of course it's always possible that Tidal have a large stock of pre-prepared MQA masters and are adding them to their system a few at a time.
There's a list of the MQA albums that people have found here...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...-Oo2MjIa3orv9DKZfwiRQKmTAA/edit#gid=945476039
drummerman
pfm Member
My head is buzzing. Is there ANYTHING clear cut about this new Tidal service?
onlyconnect
pfm Member
My head is buzzing. Is there ANYTHING clear cut about this new Tidal service?
Yes. Twenty quid a month.
Tim
pocketkitchen
Registered User
Most of the content will be from Warner's who have committed to doing their whole back catalogue and are well underway.
davidsrsb
pfm Member
I have a few CDs with the visible waveform crushing of HDCD, so I have thought of making a HDCD decoder that does the expansion without abothering to detect the flag. These are Malaysian pressings and I suspects someone touched the gain, obliterating the flag sequences
Anyway to get back on topic, which labels are on Tidal MQA?
Timcat
pfm Member
Comparing the Tidal MQA version of Joni Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter with a 24 bit 192KHz download of the album via my Aries Mini into a Mytek Brooklyn, the MQA version is night and day better in all respects, imaging and transient attack stand out especially.
Whether this is MQA, or just a better master (or both), I don't know, but I know that on this and some (but not all) other MQA encoded albums I have listened to via Tidal, the results are very nice indeed!
Whether this is MQA, or just a better master (or both), I don't know, but I know that on this and some (but not all) other MQA encoded albums I have listened to via Tidal, the results are very nice indeed!
muzzer
Numb Nut
Click on new albums then the Masters tab and show all.
You have to be a Tidal hifi subscriber to see them and use the desktop app.
I have a Bryston BDA-2 DAC which has all the nice LED's showing incoming sample rate.
After missing the rather cryptic "star" icon inside the Tidal menu and only getting 16/44, I have managed to get higher resolutions once I drilled down on the "star" icon next to the audio output device in the Tidal settings menu (and also checked the windows audio device allowed exclusive mode).
Looking at the list of MQA albums available, I do notice many have been recently remastered, but putting that aside, as per Julf, its rather hard to attribute any specific sonic improvement to MQA and not the fact that:
1- the mastering is different from some other 16/44 source you might use for comparison (or even another hi-res master)
2- the MQA source is obviously taken from a higher resolution source which immediately invalidates any 16/44 source comparision (ie generically any remastered hi-res source will potentially sound better than a 16/44 source)
I will have to see what I have in my hi-rez collection (its relatively small) to see what makes sense as a valid as possible comparison.
As an aside, my musical tastes are almost exclusively Blues, which means my collection is limited to vinyl or CD quality sources given hi-rez Blues releases are relatively small in number and cover the usual suspects.
I noticed that with the initial Tidal MQA releases, only one Blues album made it through so I am very happy for all you "main streamers" who can now stream the usual suspects (led zep, the doors etc) in hi-rez but MQA really provides no real advantage for me given what will be a limited Blues album list.
Peter
After missing the rather cryptic "star" icon inside the Tidal menu and only getting 16/44, I have managed to get higher resolutions once I drilled down on the "star" icon next to the audio output device in the Tidal settings menu (and also checked the windows audio device allowed exclusive mode).
Looking at the list of MQA albums available, I do notice many have been recently remastered, but putting that aside, as per Julf, its rather hard to attribute any specific sonic improvement to MQA and not the fact that:
1- the mastering is different from some other 16/44 source you might use for comparison (or even another hi-res master)
2- the MQA source is obviously taken from a higher resolution source which immediately invalidates any 16/44 source comparision (ie generically any remastered hi-res source will potentially sound better than a 16/44 source)
I will have to see what I have in my hi-rez collection (its relatively small) to see what makes sense as a valid as possible comparison.
As an aside, my musical tastes are almost exclusively Blues, which means my collection is limited to vinyl or CD quality sources given hi-rez Blues releases are relatively small in number and cover the usual suspects.
I noticed that with the initial Tidal MQA releases, only one Blues album made it through so I am very happy for all you "main streamers" who can now stream the usual suspects (led zep, the doors etc) in hi-rez but MQA really provides no real advantage for me given what will be a limited Blues album list.
Peter
You know - there is (and has been available for a while) at least one DAC "firmware" that's basically a busybox-based rootfs, Bluesound Node 2. Just go to their website and download it.
Their software is basically all in /root, in "encrypted" perl. I don't know if they're that stupid or just want to make it harder for script kiddies, but in case you're wondering - it's easy to crack. Even the official documentation warns about this - https://metacpan.org/pod/Filter::Crypto#WARNING .
The interesting part about it isn't their custom software though, it's the MQA decoder. They implemented it as an ALSA rate converter which you can plug into the "rate" plugin. See ie. /etc/asound/asound.conf.simple. The "ssc" converter is provided by /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_rate_ssc.so which is an ARM EABI5 shared library, so you either need to compile and run your alsalib-using program on ARM or use ie. qemu-user to run it on x86 or elsewhere. It should be then trivial to put ie. pcm.file as slave to get the output in raw PCM samples (or with WAV metadata).
Probably not of much practical use as there's no encoder, but it still could be interesting to see what it does when passed samples with mqa-encoded metadata (valid song input).
Their software is basically all in /root, in "encrypted" perl. I don't know if they're that stupid or just want to make it harder for script kiddies, but in case you're wondering - it's easy to crack. Even the official documentation warns about this - https://metacpan.org/pod/Filter::Crypto#WARNING .
The interesting part about it isn't their custom software though, it's the MQA decoder. They implemented it as an ALSA rate converter which you can plug into the "rate" plugin. See ie. /etc/asound/asound.conf.simple. The "ssc" converter is provided by /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_rate_ssc.so which is an ARM EABI5 shared library, so you either need to compile and run your alsalib-using program on ARM or use ie. qemu-user to run it on x86 or elsewhere. It should be then trivial to put ie. pcm.file as slave to get the output in raw PCM samples (or with WAV metadata).
Probably not of much practical use as there's no encoder, but it still could be interesting to see what it does when passed samples with mqa-encoded metadata (valid song input).
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