However, that was not my previous experience with Tidal when I listened a couple of years ago.
The MQA versions sounded flat, lacking in depth, bandwidth and soundstage. MQA vs Lossless: The first big surprise was that the lossless tracks sounded considerably better than the same tracks in MQA. The differences in sound quality were striking and in a way, surprising. I didn’t do random blinded testing, as the results were not subtle. All of the Tidal tracks were 16 bit / 44.1kHz, with a few of them also in MQA. I also have Weather Report in DSD64 for comparison. The Qobuz and local tracks were identical in resolution - 24 bit / 44.1kHz, 96kHz and 192kHz. The only requirement was that all tracks be available on Tidal and Qobuz as well as in my library. I selected several tracks for my test spanning a wide variety of music types - including tracks by Bach and Tchaikovsky, Miles Davis, Weather Report and Wayne Shorter, Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson, The Beatles, The Carpenters, David Bowie, Hozier, Weezer and Daft Punk. Because my wife has sensitive hearing, however, most of my critical listening is done with headphones. I also have an older Mac mini as a media server for my home theater, and I’ll try to test that setup another time. The DAC is a Beyerdynamic Impacto driving TP1 headphones. My setup is a late-model iMac running Mojave with a 3.6GHz quad core Intel Core I7 CPU, 32 GB RAM, a 500 GB SSD and my media is on an 8 TB LaCie Thunderbolt HDD. Ignore the naysayers.I conducted an experiment today to compare the sonic quality of tracks played using A+ from different sources. They have an awesome development team, and really care about their product. Some are having glitches but Roon will sort those out quickly. They have just updated Roon to v1.8 and for me it's been flawless since day 1. You can do a 30-day trial, and run the core from a computer on your network to get started, and use the desktop app to control. You can have multiple zones in other rooms and stream to those using your server. Your core holds your ripped music and the Roon Core OS, and that streams to your endpoint/streamer. Wyred4Sound makes a nice one, as does Innuos.
You can run the Roon CORE on a PC/Mac, a Roon Nucleus server, or a 3rd party server-streamer like mine. I use an Amazon Kindle 10" tablet as my "remote".
$10 a month for Roon, and it’s indispensable, imo. I just started ripping all my CDs to the server. You can arrange playlists, sort many different ways, and organize your library. Click, click, click and you’ve taken a deep dive into discovering more new music than you imagined possible. Imagine Tidal paired with Wikipedia, where all the artists, albums, tracks, notes, lyrics are hyperlinked and/or displayable. It takes streaming to a level I hadn’t imagined. ) several months ago, and I can’t imagine giving up Roon-ever. ROON! I’ve been streaming Tidal for about a year, and love it.
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