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

@decooney no more MQA on Tidal. It’s all FLAC. I have zero issues with Tidal and I use both Tidal and Qobuz. Sounds great to me as well. 

I use Tidal and Qobuz.  No such issues here.  They both sound heavenly, in my room, through my audio system.  As a matter of fact, between the two, my Roon default is Tidal and not Qobuz.  Happy listening. 

Umm sorry to burst your bubble but cds pass the limitations of human hearing so nothing is better than a cd in all honesty. Now it all depends on the original recording and mixing which is the most important part