Hi @jsgreenwood @alan33 @ChrisSU
Nothing like a good ol’ fashioned MQA debate 
Streaming service track provenance
This is one of the biggest problem with any album that is not a modern release, is what generation of copy is it and has been compromised by some post production process.
In the case of TIDAL it is a server side decision the track that is delivered and just because its in a FLAC file does not mean its the best sounding version available. The MQA masters situation has definitely muddied the water as batch encoded material will always be hit or miss if it sounds any good + when applied to a 16bit file it will rarely outperform the original version that the mastering engineer signed off when they did the CD transfers. There will always be exception cases as there are some horrendous CD’s from the past that have been remastered and have sorted out some nasties in those original transfers.
Naim has no way to influence the Tidal system. We ask for Hifi (FLAC) and the track that comes back is the track we play.
On a side note the world of provenance is not always as it seems. Last month I noticed the Badgers friend, Brian May (Queen) re-released his 90’s album ‘Back to the light’. Remastered CD 16/44.1, 24/48 and also a somewhat harder to find 24/96 variant. The 16/44.1 and 24/48 and MQA version are not that great at all - sounds like it was recorded on an Alesis ADat. However, the 24/96 FLAC is completely different mastering wise and brings some life and dynamic range into what is otherwise a pretty lousy recording.
Qobuz support on legacy
Buried deep on this forum I have described in detail why its very hard to do highdef streaming over the net on this platform. Quick version: The bridgeco streaming IC used in those products only has a 6K DMA buffer for the Ethernet peripheral which in turn means the TCP/IP window has to be restricted to that size or risk overflowing and then causing a storm of TCP retries. For 16/44.1 FLAC its right on the edge (it works out that about an 80ms network link latency from CDN to streamer is supported). As data rates go up it gets to the point where it will be very unreliable on the average ISP that run their networks quite loaded. For Qobuz support we really need to support HD and not just a small subset of their catalogue. Using a UPnP server that proxies the stream works around this issue as the UPnP server hardware, if running on modern hardware will not have this networking restriction.
Best wishes
Steve Harris
Software Director
Naim Audio Ltd.