Hi Tore and all,
You will soon be able to judge for yourself;
SQ from XXHighEnd's point of view is "untouched" when compared to the albums you normally play. Just zero difference - you will see.
The big problem with Tidal though, is that it is full of sh*t to begin with. You will see that once you use the normal XXHighEnd functions to search Tidal (Tidal can not do what XXHighEnd can regarding this) and how you are often quite unable to pick the goodies from the baddies. Example which may make this clear :
Suppose you have a random artist and he/she produced 1 genuine album per year on average. Say from of 1980. That would be 35 albums. This is what you will generally notice :
The Artist does not have 35 albums in Tidal, but 60 (I assume that all the 35 are in there to begin with). The last 25 are all from 2014 or 2015. WTF ? yes. With experience you can learn that they are fake because they carry Coverart you see more often. Someone added that.
What you will also notice is that Tidal is very keen on Remasters. The opposite of me ...
This means that Originals are hardly there and that the Remasters are your only option. And if you are like me they sound BAD. Thus :
If SQ is close to Peter`s standard i think Tidal will be Fantastic news
... I sadly need to say it is the opposite and this is because of the material Tidal chooses to use.
Almost psychological is that other problem (of 25 albums more than you like to see);
Try to invision that I really had to make some intermediate storage for resulting albums (from a search) because you don't want them to appear in your normal list of albums (hard to understand this at this moment, so this requires XXHighEnd 2.03 to see what I really mean). Point is : also with experience, you most often can not tell what the album comprised of untill you see its contents. Envision :
I search for the albums of Artist A. Within a second or two 20 albums of Artist A appear in my Library Area (that's how it nicely works). Now I want to "prepare" them for playback and later I will play them. Mind you, in this stage I'm not only looking for Artist A, but also B and C and D etc. I am NOT doing this during "play time" itself because then I do other things, like listening. So I only prepare.
And that is the problem, because after this preparation 17 of 20 albums appear to be Remixes, singles, EP's and all sorts of sh*t you would never ever run into yourself anywhere (let alone that you buy it). Point here also is : formally you can avoid EP's and singles, but mainly the EP's you'll get anyway in practice. A lot of things don't work well ...
Solution : XXHighEnd should avoid albums if the total running time is 20 minutes (or so) only. That sort of trickery is really required (but not developed yet).
One last example of annoyance :
Amongst the 20 albums of Artist A are 3 EP's, as appears later. First off, the tracks on them all come from other albums you already own (but you don't know all the track titles by heart, so you only learn that when you them and then it is sort of too late (you are annoyed). But then this is the contents of those 3 EP's :
EP1 :
01. New moon
02. Sunrise
03. Star treck
EP2 :
01. Sunrise
02. Star Treck
03. New Moon
EP3 :
01. Star Treck
02. Global division
03. New moon
Really so !!
And these are not the so-called Playlists people (like we ourselves) can provide.
Until I made something for this myself (for better selection) it can make you crazy and give up in advance.
Here ... this is what I looked for myself this morning (see below pictures) ... I searched for Tripswitch ...
Either of the first two look suspicious because the name is the same. The first one is named in full "Circuit Breaker Rewired". Yes, that kind of names look VERY suspicious (for aftermath EP's). Sadly that one is from 2007 and the other one with normal tite "Citcuit Breaker" is from 2012. Now, in my view, with either there's something wrong (but I don't know yet because I didn't look into them).
The third one named "Works" ... no need to look into that. Its a fake (of some kind). They are most often named "Works" and Works II etc. So, useless.
Next up is Collider Remixed.
Then two of whom I'd say "hey, that could be useful !".
Look at the second picture below for the contents of Stereogram. Bweh.
Ok, then Bones ... ... I did not make a screenshot because it only contains one track of 7 minutes - Bones.
The last one announces itself as single, but even if it did not, I recognize the picture because it is used more often for fakes (so what I'm saying is that someone there creates these to fill up the catalogue).
Conclusion :
While this Artist certainly produces normal Albums, I found no-one. Only rubbish. But for fun also look here :
http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/tripswitchThe ONLY ONE from Tidal's list which should be a norma Album (I did not look yet) is Circuit Breaker (the second with the green leaf). Sadly, that one is denoted as to be from 2012 while in practice it is from 2005 (see link).
Now you learned a little bit of the problem of Tidal and SQ ... You can not "select" it.
Peter
