Tidal Music

HiFi sound on TIDAL streams lossless audio by utilizing the FLAC format, providing large and uncompressed audio files for a more authentic listening experience. In order to stream MQA on any DAC, you can make use of tools such as AudFree Tidal Music Converter.

It can convert your tidal music to high quality regular MP3 and other audio formats. You can then transfer them to DAC and other devices for playback. And it won't touch the quality of the original audio. What's more, it will retain all the ID3 tags of your Tidal music tracks.

I do not have a MQA dac and for the last few days, I am comparing Tidal hifi to hifi+(we do not have Qobuz in Canada). Here's my preliminary findings : 

MQA : Music seems more dense. Details are more evident. More spectacular.

Hifi : Less in your face, more natural. More air between instruments.

I will pursue the comparaison but honestly, at first glance, I think I prefer the hifi / non MQA  version.

What do you think? Anybody else made the comparaison?

PS : English is not my first language so...

Do a free trial of Qobuz if it’s available where you are.  I switched from Tidal to Qobuz a couple years ago and will never go back.  MQA is the answer to a problem nobody had and nobody asked for.  It’s an algorithm built to modify the original signal to what IT thinks it should be — original artist’s intent be damned.  No thanks.  Plus, there’s more hi-res material on Qobuz that requires no special features or silly unfolding — what a joke IMHO.  I’ve seen lots of people here switch from Tidal to Qobuz along with me who are much happier both with the sound quality and user interface.  People switching from Qobuz to Tidal, not so much and can’t even remember anyone saying they did that.  To me, that says it all.

Unfortunately, Qobuz is not available in Canada. I tried using Qobuz with a U.S. address but it did not work (they know you are in a non-supported country).

Therefore, I have to live with Tidal, Tidal Connect being better than Apple Music AirPlay.

I had Tidal for 4 years and switched to Qobuz 6 months ago.  I much prefer Qobuz for the following reasons: (1) Qobuz just sounds better.  Not on every single album but on the vast majority;  (2) Qobuz has about 10x more hi-res content than Tidal and I prefer Qobuz 24/96 (or 192) to MQA; (3) Qobuz is quite a bit cheaper than Tidal and if you pay by the year it is more than 50% cheaper than Tidal for a hi-res tier; (4) Qobuz is more classical and jazz oriented and has a lot more offerings in these genres than Tidal.  Since I'm not into rap, hiphop or the like I do not miss Tidal at all.