Contributor I

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Tidal now displays “MASTER” - does SONOS now support MQA?

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I just noticed that Tidal displays “MASTER” now on MQA tracks where before it would kick down to “HIFI” - has SONAS started supporting MQA?

my understanding before was that even if you were playing the master quality music, it would downgrade to hifi and this was reflected in the display. What changed? Audio Quality or just the display?

i have two gen 2 Play 5s with the sub in my office. I enjoy the sound 😁

Thank you for any input!!!

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rattyAnswer

Sonos doesn't support MQA decode. It would make no sense to unfold lossy ultrasonics which could, if anything, damage the sound. Evidence does however suggest that Sonos is able to play the files by interpreting the top 16 bits, out of which some 13 bits evidently contain useful PCM music data.

Where do you see the word "MASTER"? A screenshot would be useful.

rattyAnswer

Sonos doesn't support MQA decode. It would make no sense to unfold lossy ultrasonics which could, if anything, damage the sound. Evidence does however suggest that Sonos is able to play the files by interpreting the top 16 bits, out of which some 13 bits evidently contain useful PCM music data.

Where do you see the word "MASTER"? A screenshot would be useful.

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britishwonderings

Enthusiast I

I noticed the same thing. Here is the screen shot. Thoughts?! Maybe preempting S2 although I doubt it would actually decode mqa yet. Maybe the ‘gui’ is ahead of the codec support?!

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Beam. 2x Play:1 - 2x Play One (gen 2) - Sub - 2x Play 5 - Move

ratty

What are we looking at here? The Sonos app doesn’t have shuffle and repeat controls on the main screen, they’re on the queue screen. The Tidal app?

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britishwonderings

Enthusiast I

That is the Tidal App playing through Sonos..

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Beam. 2x Play:1 - 2x Play One (gen 2) - Sub - 2x Play 5 - Move

ratty

The Tidal app doesn’t ‘play through Sonos’ as such. It asks the Sonos player to fetch the stream. Despite the Tidal app advertising ‘Master’ the Sonos player will request what it can handle.

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Chasz99Author

Contributor I

It used to show “HiFi” when you played the Tidal app through SONAS even though you selected MASTER - when I first got the Tidal app I was perplexed by this and did the research. I was told that the stream was downgraded to HiFi and that was the way it was always displayed until very recently.

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Chasz99Author

Contributor I

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ratty

It’s conceivable that Sonos is taking delivery of a 24/48 stream from Tidal. After all, Sonos will play 24/48 files from a local library. However as of now the 24-bit file is apparently truncated to 16-bit. Maybe with the coming S2 developments Sonos will choose to handle the full 24-bit PCM depth.

Nevertheless Sonos doesn’t support the MQA encoding and, given historical comments that “the math isn’t there” for higher sample rates, it seems unlikely that they would license a proprietary MQA decoder to unpack ultrasonics from the lowest bits, particularly when it’s generally accepted that these could actually degrade the sound.

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Chasz99Author

Contributor I

It will be interesting to hear as info comes out. I am sure there is a psychological impact seeing the higher rate label 😁 I have confirmed that previously it would only display “HiFi”.

Thank you all for the input! Spent the quarantined workday listening to older classics. Love the quality and easy access to so much music!

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106rallye

The most important question for me would be: have you noticed any difference in the quality of the sound?

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