Tidal adds "Masters' to Android

[Taz777]

I ended up buying an LG V30+ phone for Tidal/MQA when I heard about the updated Tidal app on Android a few weeks ago. It worked out cheaper than a midrange DAP, and I got a 'free' phone into the bargain. It sounds incredibly good, plus there are more and more tracks from the genre that I enjoy listening to being delivered in MQA. The UAPP app also detects the MQA-capable DAC in the V30+ and will send bit perfect MQA streams to it.

 

I know that Tidal and MQA isn't regarded well on this forum by some people, but since I took out my Tidal HiFi subscription a few months ago, my enjoyment of music has increased dramatically. I've found so many new artists and so many great new tracks. I have Tidal streaming music for 5-6 hours per day.

 

I've found streaming services to be 'better' than buying music. I have a large collection of ripped CDs in my iTunes library from the last couple of decades and I'm not listening to the older music much these days as there's so much great new music to discover and enjoy. For the cost of less than two HiRes albums per month, I can listen to dozens of albums every month and move on to new artists and songs over time.

 

Not for everyone obviously, but it works well for me and I'm more than a contented bunny.

 

By the way, the updated Tidal app on Android will also play MQA offline.

[Taz777]

@Cebolla I tried Qobuz a few weeks ago and was left disappointed so I cancelled the free trial. Qobuz' HiRes seems be 48kHz/24-bit mostly, from what I could tell. Obviously that sounded a bit better than Tidal HiFi. I was expecting more from Qobuz HiRes. Qobuz support was virtually non-existent when I couldn't find most of the songs that I have in my Tidal playlists. So, I cancelled my free trial out of disappointment with the lack of songs that I like to listen to and the poor support. I also found issues with the Qobuz UI which wasn't nearly as slick as the Tidal desktop (also some French language translation issues here and there).

 

At the end of the day, sound quality is irrelevant if the songs don't exist.

 

UAPP is of limited benefit to me as I mainly listen to Tidal offline on my V30+ so at the moment that's only possible via the Tidal app. There is an issue with the Tidal HiFi stream being upsampled to 48kHz though, but the music sounds fantastic regardless. UAPP doesn't suffer from the this upsampling, but it's online only. The amount of ambient noise on a plane or a busy street would make the sonic imperfections of the Tidal apps upsampling imperceptible in those environments.