Tidal Masters and MQA Question

I just want to clarify things for myself. With the Tidal HiFi subscription they offer Master recordings. I believe to play these Master albums it requires a device that supports MQA processing. If that is correct then if you do not have such a processor it would be of no benefit to turn on Master playback while streaming in Tidal and you should leave it at the HiFi setting? And again if what I stated above is correct then there would also be no benefit to selecting the Master album titles to add to your library in Tidal?

 

That was the conclusion I came to, although I may be wrong - no doubt someone will confirm.
After looking into it, it seemed to me that I needed to buy a Bluesound Node 2 or similar in order to listen to the MQA music.
On my phone, with no MQA support, the M marked album don't show up at all.

 

If you'd like to hear both sides of the MQA controversy, there's a pretty lively ongoing thread in the audio hardware forum here:

My new article series on MQA.

 

You can use Tidal's built-in software MQA decoder. You won't get MQA renderring (i.e. certain minimal-phase upsampling of the MQA-decoded signal to x2, x4, etc. sampling rate with no pre-ringing), but may be able to configure your DAC to do something similar instead (if you're so inclined), or not...

 

My understanding is that Tidal does support MQA software decoding (24/96 max? I believe). So there is some benefit to using Tidal > Master source > non-MQA DAC hardware versus the Hi-Fi setting only.

Coupling Tidal with an MQA-compatible DAC is supposed to unfold the SQ to whatever the max resolution is for that particular master.

 

From my understanding, for those using a non-MQA DAC, you can still benefit from software core decoding which will yield the following resolutions:


If original MQA file is 192, you get 96 with core decoding


If original MQA file is 96, you get 88.2 with core decoding


If original MQA file is 88.2, 48, or 44.1; then you get 88.2, 48, or 44.1. Same resolution as the original file

I also believe that in addition to higher resolution files, the core decoding entails some processing of the MQA file or de-blurring or whatever it is that MQA does but of course you don’t get all the processing/information without a MQA DAC to perform the MQA Rendering.

Tidal desktop app on a computer can perform Core Decoding, as outlined above. Tidal mobile app on phone or tablet will not perform Core Decoding, at least not yet .......

Which version of the app are you asking about? Desktop or mobile?

I don’t use desktop version. Tidal app running via my Aurender Conductor app will not Decode at this time (future software update coming soon...) but it does pass the “root” 24bit 44 or 48kHz file to my non-MQA dac.

I also have listened to full MQA decoding/rendering via my Meridian 808v6 DAC with the Aurender server/Tidal the source.

 

With Tidal MQA now on mobile, if you already have downloads in your app, do you have to re-download them to get the MQA version on your device for offline listening?