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

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. 

I'm wondering if the problem is that we stumbled onto some legacy MQA files. Both my friend and I are using Aurender devices (his N10; mine N150), played through Schiit dacs (his, an Yggdrasil; mine a Gungnir). It seems that we need to install a MQA Core-Decoder upgrade on the Aurender to play the files properly. Ugh.

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.