Hi Alex. Thanks for the article. I'd like to correct some errors to help readers out.
Everything in the article is correct except #9 and #10 which I'll correct here:
9. "Hear songs with Loudness normalization" - No. Do the opposite of what Alex says for better sound quality. TURN LOUDNESS NORMALIZATION OFF TO PRESERVE LOSSLESS SOUND QUALITY.
Loudness normalization has helped us win the "Loudness Wars"--an issue that resulted in compressed dynamic range giving us a vastly inferior recording quality for about 25 years. Loudness normalization helped us win that war and all new recordings, old recordings from before the loudness war, and remasters from about 2020 onward, have a clean bill of health. So, the secret insider knowledge here is that you want to turn it OFF to preserve your lossless bit-perfect quality. Loudness War is over and we won, it's only on by default to make sure that cancer never comes back into our recordings. FYI loudness normalization achieves its effect by sacrificing lossless bit-perfect sound quality.
9a. TIP: Tidal often has multiple versions of the same album. We tend to think "remaster" means improved but it's actually someone coming in later and tinkering with the original artistic production crew. If that remaster happened between the years of 1995 and 2017 you can almost guarantee it has compressed dynamic range. Go for the master outside this period of time, if possible, and you'll usually get a much better sound quality.
10. "Passthrough MQA gives older DACs Master sound" - No. Do the opposite of what Alex says for better sound quality. TURN THIS SETTING OFF for non-MQA DACs.
I'll blame this one on Tidal as they chose wording that made a double negative. When you click this ON you're actually turning MQA OFF for older DACs. Thus you're NOT getting the MQA quality on older DACs if you set it to ON. However, on a fully MQA capable DAC, the ON setting lets the DAC do the full MQA decoding. Yeah, very confusing, so here's a chart to help:
Better sound quality...........You have a: ............................result
OFF...........................................non-MQA DAC.....................MQA level 1
OFF...........................................MQA render DAC................best MQA quality
ON.............................................MQA decoder DAC.............best MQA quality
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