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Tidal MQA vs Qobuz hi-res

My brief experience.. for posterity.

Comparing Tidal MQA to Qobuz hi-res, you -will- hear degredation/loss in the high frequencies (violins in an orchestra etc) on MQA... assuming you have reasonably resolving equipment. For me, that’s Macbook USB to a $150 Audio Engine D1 DAC going to a $600 used Parasound A23 going to used $600 Kef LS50’s, $100 Transparent speaker cables and cheap USB and RCA cables.

The Audio Engine is surprisingly good for it’s price BTW. Over the years, trying different DACs in audio stores when I had an opportunity, I feel like you’d need to spend close to $1,000 to get something significantly better.

The A23 and LS50’s are really good too for today’s used prices. New, they would’ve been $2,500 a few years go

bataras

Showing 1 response by glupson

glupson
7,842 posts
 
Qobuz offers different file formats to download. All that I have seen have "CD quality" (16/44.1) as an option with a few lower options (mp3s, I think).

The files you dowload at 16/44.1 will be just that, 16/44.1. However, is that really what it was originally? Is there a possibility that some of those are upconverted files?

I ask because I have seen a few somewhat obscure albums in "CD quality" while I have doubts that they ever made it to CD. I am probably just paranoid, but provenance of streaming files seems unknown at times to me.
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