I tried them both way back in 2019 and very quickly ditched Qobuz for the same reason, 90%+ of my tidal listening through roon is electronic music, I also have Apple Music but very rarely listen to it.
Glad to see they’re completely ditching tidal.
MQA Deep Dive - I published tracks on Tidal to test MQA
- Thread starter GoldenSound
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I tried them both way back in 2019 and very quickly ditched Qobuz for the same reason, 90%+ of my tidal listening through roon is electronic music, I also have Apple Music but very rarely listen to it.
Glad to see they’re completely ditching tidal.
XTF1
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I did the opposite recently, I went from Tidal (back) to Qobuz.
They have all the music I need along with Apple Music which I get as part of a family package with my wife.
I got sick of waiting for Tidal to get rid of MQA not because I am completely anti it but because the in between stages seem to be a mess. Issues with pops and clicks at the start of songs and songs not playing when switching between file formats, my playlists still littered with MQA songs months in to the swap over process, I gave them enough time and I am over Tidal. Happy to pay a bit more for the lack of frustration and annoyances with Qobuz which works very well on Android, iOS and Windows.
They have all the music I need along with Apple Music which I get as part of a family package with my wife.
I got sick of waiting for Tidal to get rid of MQA not because I am completely anti it but because the in between stages seem to be a mess. Issues with pops and clicks at the start of songs and songs not playing when switching between file formats, my playlists still littered with MQA songs months in to the swap over process, I gave them enough time and I am over Tidal. Happy to pay a bit more for the lack of frustration and annoyances with Qobuz which works very well on Android, iOS and Windows.
Seems I might have acted to soon.
No MQA at all from 24th July, I will give Tidal another try after that date.
https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/...wNNI2waRLd2b3GGcbE_aem_dsiEuE_jzrkta38oUPbzRA
No MQA at all from 24th July, I will give Tidal another try after that date.
https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/...wNNI2waRLd2b3GGcbE_aem_dsiEuE_jzrkta38oUPbzRA
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Finally!
Hopefully that will put a stop to the hardware manufactures that keep including MQA support. One could dream of a small reduction in price as a result, but that's probably being way too naive
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Audiophiliac
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They won't mind dropping the lousy cheap MQA chips. In MQA's dreams my $2k DAC designer is going put those cheap MQA chips inside his DACs, especially before building a little MQA box with a chip and an external clock port for an even better original signal heading to his DAC. Fortunately, MQA has only ever spelled scam, to logic. FLAC already loses to the original uncompressed file, goodbye to trying to do that even more even without lying for a $ scam...Finally!
Hopefully that will put a stop to the hardware manufactures that keep including MQA support. One could dream of a small reduction in price as a result, bit that's probably being way too naive
XTF1
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What do you mean? Can you actually hear a difference between the original, uncompressed, file—wav for example—and its FLAC version ???
Audiophiliac
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Yup, especially when paired with the silent and confident read that requires no ECC from a SSD. FLAC is irritating, and will make my dog want to kill my favorite artist. WAV is so relaxing that it makes me have to listen to headbanger music instead of Beethoven, until my neighbor Larry does it anyways even though he can't be. Thanks to him I'm allowed to appreciate the sacred choral stuff. I'm still currently stuck with USB for my I2S output, but there's an expensive box I can put in between pc and dac that will give me a dedicated I2S signal, so that I'm no longer worse off in that way than my original $400 cd player, even though the rest of my gear smokes that.
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castleofargh
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“The more extraordinary a fact is, the more it needs to be supported by strong evidence.”
Audiophiliac
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Oh, are you one of the people who've already insisted their setups from 20 years ago were already perfect, including the low bitrate mp3's, and higher sample rates only add incorrect information to a recording? Are you going to lock this thread if people disagree with that?
Mp3 vs FLAC is not at all similar. Those are files that contain completely different information. MP3 is lossy and does not retain the same level of information as FLAC.
FLAC and WAV contain identical information
Audiophiliac
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Wow, you've decided to go with alienating all the people who think mp3's are even better than the originals this time?
FLAC requires a cpu loaded with transistors to decompress a file into memory first. Does your 12 core 4ghz cpu add noise from doing that? It depends on your ears...
XTF1
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You mean fan noise? I don’t know what OS and app you use, but if decompressing a FLAC file real time is loading a 12 core 4 GHz CPU in any meaningful way, something is really wrong with your setup…
No, it doesn't depend on your ears, it depends on facts.
If the output isn't measurably different in a null test how does it sound different ?
Expectation bias, you have a theory that it should sound better even if that theory is spurious so your mind tells you it does indeed sound better.
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