Binaural Recrdings on Tidal

Hi all
I saw that Tidal is hosting Sony 360 Reality Audio binaural recordings. Sony 360 is based on MPEG-H 3D.
I have started to listen to some of them through my Rossini with the following setup: iPhone -> Apple OTG Adapter -> USB to Rossini (no USB hub needed) -> headphone rig. Dont forget to set the iPhone’s volume to max. That one threw me completely for about half an hour. Tidal streams Sony 360 at 24/48.
Some albums sound very good, others are a total failure.
Two that I like are Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters.
Have any of you found other good ones?

Unfortunately, I found it truly horrific sounding - at least via Tidal (I haven’t heard it on Deezer).

In an effort to deliver a sonic wrap-around effect, clearly they’ve processed the hell out of the source material. For example, the top end is completely rolled-off compared to even redbook sources of the originals (not to mention highres/DSD), even the noise floor of the source seems to be raised.

All in all, not a good experience for me. :woozy_face:

Did you use an iPhone or an Android device as source? Android does sound truly atrocious. iPhone much better. I suspect Android resamples everything in the Android stack. iPhones seem to stream bitperfect and can stream DSD.

Are you sure? Please see this list of formats that i-phones can handle:

I am sure that there must be some Android phones that sound poor with wired streaming ( which is what I think we are discussing). However my old Samsung Galaxy 7 does sound good into my headphones via an Audioquest Dragonfly Red. Sure it is not a patch on my Melco/Vivaldi but it is unreasonable to expect it to. So, not as good by some way but not so far as to push it into an " atrocious" category. And there was a review of an LG Android phone a couple of years ago in Stereophile which received astonishingly positive comments on its sound quality which may have been heard ( if I remember correctly ) via JVS’ Rossini.

So I think it possible to obtain a poor opinion of the music file handling of an individual phone or model but I don’t think that applies to the entire Android OS.

Sorry, I was being a bit unclear. I was referring to streaming from an iPhone to a USB DAC via an OTG adapter. Used as a Roon endpoint, Roon displays the phone’s capabilities to include DSD, and it does actually stream DSD to the Rossini. It streams PCM all the way to 24/384kHz. Hence my conclusion that it streams bitperfect (to a USB DAC).
What it does when using it standalone with the apple music player is a completely different story.
Android phones can stream bitperfect to a USB DAC using USB Audio Player Pro. UAPP bypasses the Android audio stack completely enabling it to stream DSD to a USB DAC as well. When streaming from the Tidal app, the Android audio stack is probably being used in all cases (stand alone and OTG to USB DAC). It is absolutely possible to have excellent audio quality from an Android phone, but only by using UAPP and bypassing the android audio stack.
As a consequence of this, I vastly prefer iOS devices as streaming endpoints.
Its the same situation as with Windows’ kernel mixer and WASAPI / ASIO

Another thing I noticed is that (with both phones set to maximum volume) the Android phone was several db louder than the iPhone. If indeed the iPhone was streaming bitperfect, the Android phone was doing some kind of processing to the audio stream (given Tidal sends the same stream to both phones).

And then of course not all phones are created equal. See this article on how to get bit perfect MQA to an external DAC using iOS or Android:
How To Get The Best MQA Audio With TIDAL and Your iPhone (Plus A Word Regarding Android) – HI-FI Trends

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Rudi, thanks for the clarification. USB Audio Player Pro? Yes indeed. I should have mentioned that I also use this so you’re right, my experience was not using the native Android processing . I appreciate your comparison with the Windows mixer.

I think that current versions of USB Audio Player Pro also process .dsf files but my Dragonfly won’t :frowning_face:. On the other hand those files would use up a lot of phone memory ( even with supplementary storage) so I am happy to stick with <24/96 for portable listening which is the only environment where I use phone streaming.

I actually use the iPhone connected to a Chord Hugo 2 / headphones as a portable Roon endpoint around the house and on the terrace. I access my media library on the NAS and Qobuz / Tidal. Works like a breeze.