Thanks Simon, I can’t remember where I read about the watermarking issue, but I understood it to be on Tidal streams. Maybe that’s not what was meant - or perhaps it applies to Tidal downloads for offline listening on mobile devices?
Yes when Tidal first started there was much talk about watermarking with certain distributors of all their content … but you don’t see much mention of it now … but if used by a distributor almost certainly it will be applied to the distribution masters and I would expect to appear on all media versions - from CD, download and streaming, online etc.
Certainly a few tools out there to play with, and watermarking seems to be good business for those in recorded music production
Thanks for this information Simon. I do try to select non MQA versions but sometimes there isn’t one!
I decided to revisit Qobuz again after reporting on the old forum that I found it not to be as good as Tidal ( I have no explantion for it). I’m now paying for Qobuz and Tidal and I’m now really happy with the quality of Qobuz - there are some things on Tidal that aren’t on Qobuz so I’ll run both concurrently for a short while - although if it gets to be so little then I may as well have a Spotify sub with a better selection of obscure material.
Hi Guinnless,
If you play an MQA file at standard resolution on Tidal and compare it to the none MQA file on Qobuz, assuming there are some, do you hear any difference?
M
Guinnless, what I did find is that the default Tidal application seems not that good at finding obscure and less mainstream material or searching against certain criteria or even back catalogue of certain artists - when i used Roon as an effective frontend to Tidal (and Roon can front end Qobuz as well) I found the depth of material seemed to increase significantly - including some very obscure and interesting material indeed.
So perhaps Tidal could benefit at improving the library function on their app - and in the mean time you have the option of using Roon for fetching those more obscure and harder to find titles.
Some of the very niche titles are only on AAC though
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I may be missing something, but I do find it frustrating that I can’t see what the encoding is on the Tidal bit within the Naim app until after the track starts.
I haven’t done any back to back comparisons of MQA vs Qobuz although I was actually thinking of trying MQA vs non MQA on Tidal. Thats seems to be a comparison with fewer variables…possibly.
Thanks to Bubble I’m not stuck to Tidal as I probably won’t want to run both Qobuz and Tidal subs concurrently forever. I could drop Tidal to MP3 but that is the same price as Spotify and for obscure and/or low volume artists (like I saw on Friday night - Becky Langan) it would be a better option, I think.
Google music is another option and a free trial is avavilable.
It’s Tidal’s choice to use MQA instead of native 24bit streams of course but I think they could be missing out as time goes on.
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Simon, I wouln’t consider Roon as I’m on a 1st gen streamer (ND5XS>nDAC>XPS). When searching on Tidal I do try various search criteria to find what I want as sometimes as you imply it’s not always obvious.
I’ve come across a couple of AAC albums for obscure stuff which I don’t mind too much really, and I’ll buy it if possible if I enjoy it.
If as rumoured Naim adopts Qobuz native I think Tidal will lose a lot of Naim customers as MQA is not a viable option, even if it were desirable.
Could be interesting 
I kind of doubt that - as the Naim design team - admittedly some months ago - told us why they wouldn’t do that - it is not commercially effective and Qobuz was not available in many of the Naim target markets and customer base.
The strategy is (was) to support Chromecast, Roon and Airplay as service aggregators for support of new services globally… and out of those three Roon has the potential to be equivalent to local UPnP in terms of SQ - no doubt the reason why Naim chose it for their new streamer products
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Thanks Simon, I wouldn’t have thought it was particularly good commercial sense to be developing the new streaming platforms with no effective native hi res source, unless of course you piggy back Roon for Qobuz . Also Naim producing a server, the Core, that can’t function as a Roon server doesn’t help.
Naim are losing out to competitors because of this with the likes of Moon being viewed as a more flexible solution. Not necessarily my view but I hear this view expressed elsewhere.
If you get the chance to do the comparison I would be very interested. There was speculation about whether having the MQA data embedded in the same file would degrade the standard def experience. I appreciate this wouldn’t be a direct comparison, but some empirical experience however imperfect would be a start.
Yes, I’ll probably have to do a comparison sooner rather than later if I’m going to drop Tidal. 
Just a quick comparison - all I have time for at the moment.
Through the Naim App playing “Alison Moyet - All Cried Out” the MQA version is a bit softer, less dynamic and a touch quieter, not terrible but once you’ve heard the standard version it’s noticeable. The MQA version had a slightly higher bit rate displayed, just a few Kb/s more.
Through Bubble I compared “Madeleine Peyroux - Down On Me” and found both Tidal and Qobuz sound the same. These were both transcoded to WAV by Bubble so I can’t comment on the bit rate.
Your streamer should tell you the bit rate of WAV media on the display on the streamer.
The streamer is not in my listening room so I just went off the Bubble App which said WAV 16/44.1
I assume the ND5XS would have also displayed 44.1. I could have turned off transcoding ( to show the FLAC bitrate) but I was time limited; and the person asking never replied anyway.
So WAV (typically LPCM) shows 16 bit at 44.1kHz and presumably stereo is 16x2x44,100 = 1,411,200 bps approx 1.4 Mbps
What is streaming format from Deezer? I cant find metadata. Flac, mp3 or what?
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