Tidal SQ Issues


Has anyone experienced transient excessive harshness when streaming Tidal?

I'm a "high-res" streaming newbie, and was auditioning a friend's system last week. For the most part, I was really impressed by the quality of what I was hearing. But, a few tracks were accompanied by a discordant brightness that made the track virtually unlistenable. In trying to troubleshoot the root of the problem, I suggested that it might be due to the friend using coaxial rather than usb to connect the streamer to the dac.

Then, later in the week, I experienced the same issue on my own system. That got me thinking that Tidal Max's "better-than-cd-quality" algorithm was overcompensating for something in the original file and introducing some noise into the "up-res'd" version. I wonder, if the same effect would occur if I used their lower quality streams (but, really, why bother?). Going to try Qobuz out to see if it has similar issues.

danto

Showing 2 responses by soix

It seems that we need to install a MQA Core-Decoder upgrade on the Aurender to play the files properly. Ugh.

No, you don’t need to do anything except get Qobuz. 

Yeah, try Qobuz.  I thought Tidal was done with cryptic algorithms making recordings sounding “better” after ditching MQA but apparently not.  You’ll probably be happier with Qobuz.