I will try to explain why it is beneficial to me. However not everyone has the same needs, please bear that in mind.
I want to avoid all the work of ripping my old cd’s, or to pay a huge amounts for hi-res files.
Not only that: I found myself even with a highly integrated app like Roon constantly checking: is this my own rip, do I still need it? Why is it appearing double in the overview? Some high-res music files I will keep anyway, that are not on Tidal yet, but I am quite sure 95% is on. So I decided to get rid of the administrative work and gradually I delete all the NAS music files that I can find on Tidal.
I can now download/stream anytime on any Tidal device music file quality level (size) that I like. With e.g. Qobuz you can not choose. So you will have huge amounts of datas on your phone (and lots of time to download when getting a new phone) when you decide to put them “offline” on the phone.
When streaming on the road, I can choose to use low bandwidth and when at home i choose high bandwidth, using the same playlist. I do not want any separation of playlists.
Qobuz for example pushes the music stream to the endpoint. So you need an expensive controller to push without loss. With Tidal you can tell your endpoint with any cheap mobile device that has a Tidal app to pull the music. The only lossy part is the compression itself (which is high end quality), but not the transport. The transport can in fact mess up a lot, especially while trying to push large files over a network. The chances are likely that pushing a huge file can mess up more than some theoretical inaudible MQA lossy data loss. I exaggerate a little now to make it more understandable, but this seems to me the reason why it was designed this way.
I am not sure what you mean by paying extra but Tidal including MQA is in my view currently cheaper than most other high-res services. Probably because they need lesser bandwidth.
Maybe this explanation clears up some motivations to you?
Anyway I guess the world would look different if there was unlimited bandwidth and devices with unlimited processor power and storage
BTW: with Roon you have your NAS files conveniently in the same overview but Roon does not play when on the road. I like to be able to download or stream my music any time any place. (I know you can also access NAS from abroad, and play for example using DS Audio app, but I prefer the situation where I do not have to maintain a NAS for this purpose).
I am new to volumio, i cant get the mqa unfold on my integrated amp - lyngdorf tdai-3400. This amp are able to unfold mqa and they claim it does work in the usb input as well. however, it doesnt work with volumio. It only get up to 24/48 in playing the same song. do the mqa support determine and negotiate by usb protocol or its kind of a device whitelist that needed to be add by Volumio team manually ?
At least…I catched the “Magenta Illumination”
My setup RPi4 with ZenDac V2 and Audirvana.
Set in Audirvana to “only renderer” it gives me the magentish light.
To be honest: With my old ears I am not able to hear any difference to green or blue.
But I wanted to get it. And now I can forget it for the rest of my life.
Rgds!
I did found another topic on your community that explain the same thing. As Volumio is not able to unfold the first stage of MQA streams, users SHALL used a full unfolding DAC to be able to decode MQA. Render MQA devices needs a pre-unfolded stream which Volumio doesn’t do for all the reasons you explained.
There should be a sort of FAQ page somewhere to explain that fact. I’m not the only one on this forum having the same question.
Hey community,
I am wondering what exactly is happening when Tidal shows that MQA is playing, but my DAC(Denafrips Ares II) actually doesn’t support MQA. Is it automatically switched to the highest non-MQA quality(24/192)? Volumio streams through PI2AES.
Nope, it will just be the lossy container 16bit/44.1 kHz from Tidal that will be played.
Is it possible to configure somehow to disable MQA on Tidal? When my DAC was connected to my laptop, I had this option in settings, but now I don’t see it anywhere on Volumio/Tidal.
