TIDAL Desktop Application or Chrome Browser?

Glad you re enjoying it, Ghosthouse.  I use both my PC and my IPAD to do the searching and mark up my favorites.  I can sort by artist, album of playlist.  The squeezebox interface isn't very helpful, so my ipad comes in very handy.  As for playback, here is what I have found.  Playing through Chrome webplayer - sound very dependent on throughput and how well your puter is running/set up/other processes.  Playing through Tidal app - seems to do a better job of isolating out the windows processes and a bit less dependent on windows shortcomings.  On a 3rd party player - I feel all windows downsides have been eliminated and throughput issues are the the lowest.  I also find that the catalog is growing daily.  

Hi,
Been surfing the web regarding TIDAL and have found many threads indicating TIDAL is in dire financial straits (loosing 28M in the past year) as well as not paying some substantial depts. I really hope TIDAL can hang in there!

On another topic concerning TIDAL playback, I have found (after some PC tweaking) that the desktop App sounds best to me. Through sound configuration settings on my Windows PC, and in the TIDAL app, I was able to configure my system where TIDAL has exclusive use of the S/PDIF output of my audiocard. It took a great deal with A/B to find the best settings, but I think I have managed to get out of my PC and audiocard the best they can do without Windows messing with anything. Granted, this excercise yielded only a small improvement, but I'll take it!

FYI... Tidal windows desktop application has option under "streaming" to select exclusive use of your dac.  From my understanding this uses WASAPI.  It should yield a bit perfect 16/44.  It my case it does.  My USB dac detects it as 16/44khz.  You can also pipe it through your home avr via HDMI/SPDIF etc.

I know these three letters are controversial, but if you want to listen in "Master" quality (MQA) I don't think Chrome supports that.  I use the desktop app.