Tidal Connect

Has anyone tried the new Tidal Connect feature with their legacy streamer or will this only be available for the new streamers? I know most have switched to Qobuz. But curious as to me the Tidal and Qobuz apps have a much better user interface than the Naim app.

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Isn’t this just a rebranded Chromecast/airplay function.? Shows all my Chromecast capable devices same as before.

Edit . Looks like they added the ability to cast mqa so that’s the only difference.

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Thank you very much for your post @DomTomLondon! These are great news to me. I am still using Tidal. Looking forward to see the support for the Uniti Atom. Sometimes I would love to use the Tidal apps directly and not the Naim app. I am soooo excited … :slight_smile:

It might be the same as Chromecast and Airplay, but the older streamers don’t support either, but did support Spotify Connect, so I have hope it might also support this.

Unlikely it looks like it’s new code that would need to be added but you never now. Qobuz have a connect thing to but don’t know a single device that uses it. Just tried casting and no MQA sent still limited to Hifi so nothings changed on that side.

Hm. Same here. I updated the Tidal app on all devices, but they are only showing the chromecast and airplay devices and they are not showing the Tidal connect claim as mentioned in the instruction videos. So maybe Naim has to bring a software update first? I don’t know.

I really hope that this is more than a rebranded chromecast feature. I understood that chromecoast is compressed, isn’t it? Hopefully Tidal connect will bring full cd quality (or more) to my Uniti Atom without the naim app which is not working totally perfect at the moment at my home. But maybe I am way to optimistic …

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That’s what I understand !

Chromecast just instructs the player what to play, but the processing in the head unit is different. From the source:

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Thanks for explaining, @Suedkiez!

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I don’t know if it’s still an issue, but at least at one point Chrome (the browser) did something weird. Using the Chromecast from the browser did not yield the same results as from apps. Can’t remember whether it was compression or something else.

The browser is different. The statement above was for the Qobuz app. The Chromecast extension in the browser does so-called tab casting, where the browser sends the actual data from the tab. That’s also why the browser player has a setting for max. bitrate. You need to set that to max. I think you’d need a pretty poor computer for hi-res audio streaming being a performance issue - this Chromecast implementation in the browser is probably more an issue with video.

No Chromecast is fully uncompressed.

Too bad, I only see the chromecast (hifi) for my NDX2 as well in the Tidal app. Perhaps Naim are going to add a dedicated Tidal-Connect that would be able to handle the (master) MQA first unfold from the Tidal app. It would be good to hear from Naim marketing on their position regarding the Tidal announcement…

We’ll be introducing TIDAL Connect support in 2021 via a free firmware upgrade to our latest generation of streaming products (Mu-so and Mu-so Qb 2nd Generation; Uniti Atom, Star and Nova; ND 5 XS2, NDX 2, ND 555). We’ll keep everyone updated.

In the meantime, you can continue to enjoy TIDAL in superb quality directly from the Naim App (including via earlier-generation Naim streaming products), or via Roon, or use Chromecast or AirPlay to listen via the TIDAL App.

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Thank you for pointing that out, @Naim.Marketing! :blush:

You can find the details of the issue here:

Definitely with audio, but it might be that the implementation in the browser is somehow optimised for video.

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Can you please introduce this as well for the legacy mu-so’s ? I’d be happy to turn off Spotify Connect and a lot of other features on those to have this one.

Thank you.

Not possible, i’m afraid. We did introduce AirPlay 2 to first-gen Mu-so, though, so that gives you an option to cast TIDAL App direct (assuming you have an Apple device!)
And, of course, you have native TIDAL implementation.

That’s precisely the problem. I don’t have an Apple device. Tidal connect would be something that’s not OS specific and should work for both Apple and Android, so feel free to remove Airplay support in favour of Tidal Connect. :wink:

I do keep getting the feeling Naim views its Android users as second class citizens :frowning:

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What’s wrong with native Tidal?