What is your opinion? And why ;-)?
Cheers,
Przemek
Hi Przemek (Cześć!
)
As a fresh owner of o bluetooth dac with LDAC (that so so praised Radsone mk100) I investigated this problem so I feel I can give you my findings.
The main reason of my inspection was that by default I actually got worse quality sound from the external DAC than from the internal phone dac directly by cable (which is also not bad, Xperia XZ1 Compact).
So first thing - when the LDAC is set to lets say 96khz (as default) and the sound material is 44.1 - upsampling has to happen. I found the instruments are somehow blurred, flatten with lost textures, comparing to that I got from phone by cable.
Tidal masters are sometime multiple of 44.1 (88.2), sometime multiple of 48 (96), so there is no one fixed solution.
My finding is that
for the best unaltered quality, the LDAC just have to be set to exactly the played native frequency.
What is another
problem with Tidal or another apps is the android audio stack. This is the same problem, the same situation, as we have on windows and default windows sound output, (which we all want to avoid), and remedies like exclusive mode, asio etc. Actually it seems that Tidal also can resample the sound trough android stack. Probably you dont realize (as me, till yestrday) that system frequency in android is 48khz, and everything, what is not specially handled, is resampled to this frequency.
BUT, good news is that, there is an app
USB Audio Player PRO, which can play directly to the internal or USB dac, omitting the android stack, and also omitting some stack to the bluetooth. Reading the recommendations, I installed it and
it REALLY sounds better both on cable, and on bluetooth. In fact now I hardly go back to native tidal app, because it doesnt sound as good, as through the UAPP. The minus is that this app is not so handy as native Tidal app unfortunately... And to get to get the sound unaltered for the Bluetooth, you have to read what frequency is written for the current track, and if changed, switch the LDAC s/r to this frequency... Unfortunately, this is very inconvenient and I would love to get better idea how to avoid manual switching. (for playing by cable, you dont have to switch anything)
Actually, playing Tidal through the UAPP, the sound on the Bluetooth is quite good even when the s/r doesn't match the native frequency (there is less blur than from native Tidal app), but yeah, still, as I said, the best is to set LDAC the native S/R.
Also, I dont know which DAC you have, if you have selectable filters, but I dont find the default slow roll of filter to be neutral - it smoothes the sound and slightly changes it. The short, unsymmetric filters even more - imho they should be definitely avoided. The overall result might be highly dependent on the sound material and/or used headphones and preferences. For me the standard (long) sharp filter is most accurate (/detailed) and neutral.
So resuming, the main problem is not the LDAC codec, but to avoid resampling (maybe even multiple resampling) on the way from the native source to the LDAC. Though the UAPP and matched sampling rates, the result is really very good. But is so unhandy... :/
Another topic is that
on Tidal, many albums have watermarking and sometimes less, sometimes more it is audible and disturbing like a flutter/phazer effect. The watermarking is intentionally in audio band, to cannot be easily removed without another sound distortions
.
I compared one album with a Primephonic (this is another service, which is known that doesnt have watermarking), and wow, all the strange flutters dissapeared.
So sadly,
Tidal is not everywhere lossless without special attention when playing from the native app, and even the
Tidal source files are not always lossless because were watermarked sometimes with destructive effect.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Greets
Bartek