Tidal Hifi or not Hifi?
As an importer of Antipodes streamers, which work excellently with Roon software among other things, we use our own files daily that we play from SSD drives, but we also use Tidal. The quality of Tidal is very good when you use the Hifi subscription. It costs €19.99 per month, but then you get uncompressed Flac in return.
However, we have noticed that this is not always the case. Sometimes it seems the playback quality suddenly becomes a bit lower now and then. Roon indicates this reliably by showing what kind of file is coming in. We play a record from time to time, well, a file, by Deborah Henson-Conent: Just for you. Nice CD with lots of nice tracks, and sometimes sounding very good and dynamic. Today, however, it didn't sound very nice anymore. Suddenly we notice that Roon indicates with the yellow dot that the quality is not Flac, but MP3.... Low Quality!? We hadn't noticed this before. Other files come in normally in Flac. Looking at other albums, it turns out that MP3 often comes in instead of Flac.
What's going on here? Why do you sometimes receive MP3 files? Does anyone know more about this?
Ohm-Audio BV 2017-06