Hi there,

Not sure if this is the right place to post about this, but here we go...

I've used Tidal for years in NZ with no problems, and was always on the plan that capped quality at 16/44.1. I stream on a PC, Android and a Cambridge Audio streamer. All has worked flawlessly.

A couple of months, Tidal opened up the 'HiRes / Max' quality setting to all Tidal plans, so of course I've switched over.

When you select "Max" quality in Tidal, it just streams whatever the highest quality format they have available (anything above 16bit 44.1KHz - which is called "High" quality (same as CD)).

So, when on "Max", you might get 24/48KHz, 24/96KHz, 24/88.2KHz, 24/192KHz ... etc

I can stream all formats no problem -- except 24/192KHz. I can listen for hours and as soon as I get to a track that's 24/192KHz, I get constant audio buffering / pauses in the playback.

I have been in lengthy discussion with Tidal about it and have done all sorts of troubleshooting, but no luck. Tidal are helpful, but they're a bit evasive about what the actual problem might be. They've had me uninstall the Tidal app and go through all sorts of stuff that's made no difference. Because I have the same issue on 4 different devices, it's clearly not that kind of an issue. 

Also, it's not my internet connection, I get 900MBps downstream consistently. I can play a 24/96KHz stream, a 4K youtube video and browse the web while running speedtest.net -- all at the same time -- without any network issues, buffering or anything.

ONLY when Tidal tries to play a 24/192KHz track does the buffering start. By my calculations, serving a 24 bit 192Khz stream would require approx 10MBps (add some for overhead, say 12MBps). That's not even close to maxing out my internet connection.

It seems to me that perhaps little ol' NZ is just too far away from Tidal's servers, and they (the Tidal streaming servers) can't consistently serve the ~10MBps stream.

The extra annoyance is that there's no way to simply set Tidal to cap the playback quality at 24/96KHz. No such option exists, if it did, I could easily work around the issue by just listening to 24/96KHz, which would be fine.

I've asked Tidal several times where the servers are located, and whether they have a datacenter in NZ, but they never comment. My guess is it's in Australia with some local data cached with a CDN provider in NZ.

Are any other NZ Tidal users experiencing this problem?

Any input or comment appreciated.

Thanks for reading.