DISTORTION EXCLUSIVE MODE TIDAL

[musickid]

using two computers a macbook air and an imac i am getting distortion only in exclusive mode on tidal. i've tried different cables//wifi//ethernet wired to no avail. i'm using a chord hugo 2 as its my only dac i can't check against another dac. can someone please run their dac through tidal exclusive mode and let me know here if you get distortion. thus we can eliminate tidal as the culprit here or not. cheers to all mk.

[Geoff1954]

Yes! And as I understand it the problem is at TIdal's end.

I corresponded with Tidal for many weeks on this subject. I was using an iMac running OS Maverick and a Geek Pulse DAC. The DAC is not maximized for TIDAL use but I should have been able to obtain the first "unfold." And occasionally I was able to. But it was not consistent and ultimately the distortion WAS consistent.

Tidal told me it was an MQA software problem. So I checked directly with MQA and learned that was NOT true. (Tidal later apologized for the "misunderstanding.") Tidal then told me they were working on a fix which should come out in a new Tidal release. To my knowledge that has never happened.

Then...my iMac died (after 10 years). I replaced it with a new one running the latest Mac OS. The problem vanished. No more distortion. Master files play very well.

You should know Tidal advised me that simply updating my Mac OS software on the old machine would not guarantee a fix for the problem so I never tried that. How much of the fix was new software and how much new computer hardware, I don't know.

You should definitely contact Tidal and ask for help.

[phariphan]

Musickid, Tidal is the culprit.  The last update to Tidal's application on the Mac appears to have broken exclusive mode with Chord dacs.  I'm using a Mojo and within the same day it went from working fine to sounding distant and distorted (after the restart for the app update).  Other Chord users are reporting identical problems.  You can can confirm that it's Tidal and not your Hugo 2 by finding an MQA track and playing it.  It should sound fine, even in exclusive mode.  It's "just" playback of non-MQA tracks that Tidal managed to break in this last update.

[phariphan]

Happy to report that an update today to Tidal fixed my problem with non-MQA playback in exclusive mode on my Chord DAC.     I hope that others are experiencing the same.