Hello there, Audirvana is great! Love it. Affordable, but better sounding than most solutions out there including Roon and personally for my taste, HQPlayer too. However, one issue that’s forcing me to use the original Tidal app instead unwilingly is the issue with unequal volume or perceived loudness. Roon seems to do a great job of enabling similar perceived volume but I believe they invested big in some meta data stuff that helped with this. I hope Audirvana has a way of doing the same, it’s incredibly hard to always reach the volume control when it’s too loud or too soft.
Hey, sorry for the late reply as I’ve been busy working and could not test my system. It seems so that for MQA tracks it’s a lot louder. but it seems some MQA tracks does not have this issue. It seems rather random. It seems the metadata? for determining the loudness of a particular track cannot be trusted, and maybe that’s why it’s inaccurate.
If I were to play on Tidal, it seems they are able to maintain about he same volume throughout, however, Tidal’s quality is substantially worse compared to Audirvana’s. Audirvana’s sound is better than Roon’s too.
This means that Tidal app is normalizing the audio, no matter if it’s a Master (MQA) track or a lossless track. MQA tracks have the Replay Gain information embedded in it but we can’t read the information until the track start to play.
I understand. That’s quite unfortunate and unfair that Tidal built it this way. I really hope they will cater to outside vendors who use their API, after all the vendor’s success is also Tidal’s success.
Keen to learn if there are ways around or that solves this issue.
Audirvana is great! Love it. Affordable, but better sounding than most solutions out there including Roon and personally for my taste, HQPlayer too. However, one issue that’s forcing me to use the original Tidal app instead unwilingly is the issue with unequal volume or perceived loudness. Roon seems to do a great job of enabling similar perceived volume but I believe they invested big in some meta data stuff that helped with this. I hope Audirvana has a way of doing the same, it’s incredibly hard to always reach the volume control when it’s too loud or too soft.
So it affects the sound loudness that is being transmitted to the Audirvana?