Tidal Master HIFI / Connect

Evening … I’ve looked through the forum … it’s just a quick tidal question … i pay for Tidal Master ( Amber M ) next to track … now when I select Masters track and listen to it on my phone it’s reads Master ( Amber M )

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As soon as I select my Atom and play from that it changes to HIFI ( turquoise ) … Tidal connect

I don’t want to pay for something Im not hearing and I must admit my Atom and PCM.s are slightly better sounding than my phone … I’m sure this will be covered somewhere but I just can’t find the answer in simple terms

Thku

The Atom doesn’t play Tidal “Masters” aka MQA. Nor does any Naim :slightly_smiling_face:

A very quick clear and concise answer … thank you .

I could of had a sleepless night with my hifi ocd ….

Thank you !!

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Unless you use Roon which will do a first unfold of MQA and stream to the Atom…via PCM at a higher rate - typically at 88.2 or 96khz. Not quite lossless as pointed out below due the MQA origin.

Once you have done the first unfold then it’s PCM - munged PCM but still PCM without any MQA signalling.

Aha! no point paying for Tidal HiFi then when my £2 trial ends in April. Looks like this thread has saved me £10 per month!

Tidal Hifi is CD quality and useful. It’s Tidal Hifi Plus that includes Master (MAQ) and that you don’t need.

(Note that the plans changed recently. In the past, the Hifi included Masters, but not anymore)

Hi

Just seen this topic. Sorry if this already covered (here or elsewhere) but is there any update to the MQA support? I just signed up to Tidal hifi plus, mainly to use it with my Naim Uniti Atom. The Tidal Connect app shows master quality streaming but on the Atom it’s showing as Flac 16bit/44.1 kHz.

I used my savings ($10 per month) to subscribe to Qobuz. :grinning:

No Naim streamer supports MQA and my guess is they never will. It might show as Master in the Tidal app but it is converted to CD quality for the Atom. If you want hi res on the Atom then Qobuz is the obvious choice. If you stick with Tidal at least downgrade your package to hifi as hifi plus is a waste of money with Naim.

Type in ‘Naim and MQA’ into the search freature and you will find 50+ threads to read through. A lot of history regarding this subject on the forum.

I moved from TIDAL to Qobuz when it became available in the US and was a much better match for me. Great Hi-Res music over the CD quality of TIDAL. I also had no interest in MQA.

For some they believe that TIDAL has a better catalogue collection for there musical tastes, other believe Qobuz or one of the other streaming services meet their music needs, some have bought other MQA ready products and introduced them into their system. Others have just moved on…

Thanks. Very helpful advice for a relative newbie

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These are the canonical posts from Naim staff on MQA support, I don’t think there was any change since:

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