Audio Quality & PipeWire Setup

March 16, 2026 · View on GitHub

By default Chromium resamples all audio to 48kHz, which degrades high-quality content from Tidal (HiFi / Max). TIDAL Hi-Fi includes a setting to force the output sample rate to 192kHz, but your system's audio stack also needs to be configured to take advantage of it.

Table of Contents

Enabling 192kHz output in TIDAL Hi-Fi

  1. Open settings (Ctrl + =)
  2. Navigate to the Advanced tab
  3. Enable Audio output sample rate (192kHz)
  4. Restart the app (flags only take effect on launch)

This passes --audio-output-sample-rate=192000 to Chromium and disables the out-of-process audio service so the flag is respected.

Configuring PipeWire (Linux)

The Electron flag alone is not enough — if PipeWire (or PulseAudio) is running at 48kHz it will resample the stream back down before it reaches your DAC.

⚠️ Warning: Setting rates in the PipeWire config that your hardware doesn't support will crash PipeWire, leaving you without audio.

First, find the sample rates your DAC supports:

# List all sound cards
aplay -l

# Check supported rates for a specific card (replace 0 with your card number)
cat /proc/asound/card0/stream0

# Alternative if the above doesn't work (e.g. on some USB DACs)
aplay -D hw:0 --dump-hw-params /dev/null 2>&1 | grep -i rate

If you have multiple sound cards, use aplay -l to find the right card number and check /proc/asound/card<N>/stream0.

The rates listed in the output are the ones you should use in the PipeWire config below. Create (or edit) ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/sample-rate.conf and set default.clock.rate to the highest supported rate, and default.clock.allowed-rates to all of them:

context.properties = {
    # highest supported rate
    default.clock.rate          = 192000
    # <all supported rates, space-separated>
    default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 44100 48000 88200 96000 176400 192000 ]
}

Then restart PipeWire:

systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse

The allowed-rates list lets PipeWire switch dynamically to match the source rate, so 44.1kHz content won't be needlessly upsampled either. You can verify the active rate with pw-top.

Recovery: If PipeWire crashes after applying this config, delete (or fix) the file and restart:

rm ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/sample-rate.conf
systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse

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