I’m on the trial Tidal HiFi option now. Streamed some music last night. A couple notes:
1) streaming “masters” music over WiFi is not a viable solution. I had to switch to wired.
2) The blue MQA light came on the M50.2 and my Emotiva was getting 24bit/96khz music (so, definitely getting the first bit of decoding) rather than the 16/44 I get from ripped CDs or even the default 24/44. But that brings me to...
What is really going on? Tidal doesn’t tell me (anywhere I can see) what the music specs are...so if it was never encoded above 96, I’m not going to get above 96. On What’s HiFi, a reviewer wrote (reviewing Tidal Masters):
The benefit of owning (currently limited) kit with built-in MQA decoders, such as the Audirvana Plus 3 computer software – announced at CES 2017 – or Meridian’s Explorer DAC 2, is that all decoding is done by the hardware (bypassing the app in this respect altogether), which can unpackage the entire MQA file for playback in its original resolution.
my M50.2 is indeed directly hooked up to Tidal. So, if the music was encoded at 192kb, I should be getting it...I assume. I will try to find some music that should be 24/192 and see if I get that tonight. That being said, I am at least getting 24/96 from Tidal without a newer MQA signed DAC. That’s a small bit of success.