Hey Colin,
Great thanks - I can work with that.
But bad news - as expected ...
It is 16/44.1 or IOW, the stupid MQA stuff (not even the "good" stuff, because 16 bits).
Internally it is denoted "HiRes" opposed to "Lossless" (smart move) and it readily explains why I deemed many albums flawed-sounding - this will sound bad as well (because molested Hires and nothing is done to it by XXHighEnd now (MQA decoding is disengaged per new download means).
Of course this depends on your info, although I can of course check that myself too. Wait ...
Hmm ... that says Master, so where did you find Max ? I verified the ID :
https://tidal.com/browse/album/4157739
hahahahahaha, bunch of stupid ***sholes. Look below;
So my Tidal player proposed an update and after that voilá, the Master denotation changed to Max.
As a bonus, the last picture shows nothing next to the albums while prior to the update more than half showed "Master" next to them.
So as expected, Tidal is fooling us all and I guess it won't be so that they saw that I can see through all (XXHighEnd can), and thus they banned XXHighEnd as a software player from Tidal. I do like to think this though.
Question is : how do all formal Tidal players work with this ? have they all been banned ?
How does the existing MQA hardware go about this ? The album is exactly the same as it was (you could do a compare, Colin) so that hardware (but also software players) will happily show it is still MQA.
In the end it is not the best example, because we should have a 24 bit one. But now I know how this works, I can inject those myself a. to the new environment and b. to the Tidal app.
More in a next post.