Going from Spotify Premium to Tidal Hi-Fi?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Phono Groove, May 23, 2017.

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  1. Stereosound

    Stereosound Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    Throw Pandora in with that merger as well.
     
    SandAndGlass likes this.
  2. Vinylfindco

    Vinylfindco The Pressing Matters

    Location:
    Miami
    Thanks for mentioning that setting. I had mine turned on - now off.
     
    RoyalScam likes this.
  3. Darwin1984

    Darwin1984 Active Member

    Location:
    Carlsbad, Ca.
    I have subs to Tidal, Pandora, and Apple Music. I dumped Spotify since it gives me nothing that I can't get from Apple Music in a better interface and also combine my years of iTunes music from multiple sources.
    320k Ogg is no great shakes sound quality wise and I find Apple Music 256k AAC to be better and Tidal much better. MQA on Tidal is great too although there is rumor Spotify is going to that and high res.
    If you are a veteran or active duty Tidal is $11.95 a month.
     
  4. duggan

    duggan Senior Member

    Location:
    sydney
    Wouldn't it be wonderful, Spotify's audio quality and Tidal's interface.
     
    Robert C likes this.
  5. 500Homeruns

    500Homeruns Peaceful Punk

    Location:
    Lehigh Valley, PA
    Use the edit.
     
  6. duggan

    duggan Senior Member

    Location:
    sydney
    It was written in jest, not in error.
     
  7. Claude Benshaul

    Claude Benshaul Forum Resident

    Great joke, except that there is nothing funny about Tidal. It's a UI design disaster in routine use that progress to a life threatening hazard if you make the mistake to try and use it while driving.
     
    duggan likes this.
  8. Wired4Fun

    Wired4Fun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cary, NC
    Tidal user since day 1, and I run a BlueSound NODE2. I find that the longer I use TIDAL, the MORE disappointed I become with its usability, and I find many bands I get a hankering to listen to, are not there. As an example, TOOL. Went to play some of their music, and none of it was available. Not sure if this is the same with other music services, but it has happened 4 or 5 times in the last year. Go to play a song, and they don't have it :( I am sure it is not an exclusive issue to TIDAL, but when you are having a hard time navigating, ONLY to find out the band or artist doesn't have their music available, it's like insult to injury.

    I do love the hi-rez quality. It is really great. $20 a month feels high, but I have been paying it so long, I forget the bill exists, LOL.

    Anyway, if ANY other service offered a wide catalog AND hi-rez, you could easily assume I would try it, as TIDAL does not have a loyal customer in me, just a moderately satisfied one.
     
    duggan likes this.
  9. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    Of all the bands to use as an example, you chose Tool, one of the earliest groups to point out that their music was being stolen by Napster and many other illegal providers during the late '90s. Tool suceeded in punking the entire Web and illegal downloading 'net by spoofing the announcement of their third album under a phony name. The illegal sites were deluged immediately thereafter with phony tracks. Then Tool actually released the album - Lateralus - and essentially thumbed all the stupid idiots, some of whom ended up downloading virus laden garbage.

    The point is that Tool never walked on the same side of the street as the rest of us. The other point is that Tidal, Spotify, Qobuz and all the rest of the legit music services, don't simply grab what they want and then somehow figure out how to compensate artists after the fact. Rather, all the legit streaming services negotiate licenses for albums and music libraries directly from the artists (less commonly), the labels (frequently) and the authorized distributors (also frequently). Those suppliers agree to supply a streaming service provider with a specific file quality, depending on what the service normally provides in whatever different service tiers it offers.

    Anyone who takes a half minute or so to check for himself will find that Tool albums and tracks aren't yet available from Tidal or Spotify. That's because the Tool rightsholders haven't made the decision to license their music to streaming services. It has nothing to do with Tidal or Spotify.

    As for Tidal and Spotify user interfaces, at least where the smartphone and tablet apps are concerned, the user interfaces are now far more similar than not. That growing similarity has been occurring throughout late 2016 and all of 2017 so far. The main search functionality in Tidal is also improving each and every month - something I personally consider to be far more important than most other considerations.
     
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  10. Wired4Fun

    Wired4Fun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cary, NC
    I made a quick reply regarding a band I like. Perhaps I should have chosen another favorite so as not to receive a completely unnecessary and condescending dressing down from you? Or perhaps you're just a nasty troll who can't accept that someone posts a thought quickly while taking a poop, LOL?

    Either way, and with all due respect... your tone sucks. No need for it. Thanks.
     
  11. Wired4Fun

    Wired4Fun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cary, NC
    ...and if perchance I am having a bad day and/or read your post with an unintended tone... my apologies.

    But I think I have this one right.
     
  12. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    IMHO, Agitater's comments were very concise and did provide, what appears to me, a rather detailed back story about Tool, which I for one, was provided with insight that I did not have previous knowledge of.

    Well said, Agitater!

    I also don't get the feeling that Agitater's comments were, in any way, an attack on you, just an explanation.

    You did, after all, use Tool for your specific example, didn't you?

    I really don't think that there was any animosity intended. Just my take on the thread.
     
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  13. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    There is nothing - nothing - I can add to this. Funniest thing I've read on any forum so far in 2017.

    Anyway, I really think you mistook my reply for something other than what it was. Trolling is much, much different.
     
  14. Wired4Fun

    Wired4Fun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cary, NC
    Fair enough. It was the line, "Anyone who takes half a minute or so to check for himself..." that made the entire post come off as kinda sour.

    Still, no hard feelings. I was being butt hurt from both a difficult poop, AND my obvious laziness, LOL.

    Carry on.

    Also, I like Tidal. :)
     
  15. dolstein

    dolstein Senior Member

    Location:
    Arlingon, VA
    I have both - Spotify Premium and TIDAL Hi Fi. And the great thing is that it only costs me $5 a month. I get Spotify Premium free with my New York Times digital subscription, and I get at 75% discount on TIDAL Hi Fi as a Third Man Records Vault subscriber. Pretty sweet deal.
     
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  16. mwheelerk

    mwheelerk Sorry, I can't talk now, I'm listening to music...

    Location:
    Gilbert Arizona
    I'm just a recent Tidal user. I was on the free trial for a couple of weeks with standard Tidal and then switched over to Tidal Premium for the higher resolution streaming (CD quality) rather than the MP3 streaming quality which seemed somewhat flat to me in comparison to my digital library. I'm satisfied with the sound of Tidal Premium. I must admit I quickly changed my reasons for trying streaming and I'm sorry I was so resistant to trying it earlier. My initial purpose was simply to sample various albums to discover music I would then buy and rip into my digital library. Once I switched to Premium I realized this would be my source for new music and not just the discovery of it.
     
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  17. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    Have you set Streaming quality (or download for that matter) to "Extreme"? I use this as the default and delighted with it. No issues at all for me, but long term Spotify user here, all that said.
     
  18. High Fidelity

    High Fidelity Well-Known Member

    Location:
    London
    According to my neighbour with a very expensive Hi-Fi set up Tidal is superior. As for me no interest in streaming or downloading much prefer to buy a disc
     
  19. BayouTiger

    BayouTiger Forum Resident

    Ditched Spotify in favor of MOG ages ago. When Tidal first came out it was not very good, but it has certainly filled out and with a Roon front end is, by far, the best streaming combo I've experienced. Roon is the driving force behind it. I would use Roon over any other solution even without Tidal, but the combination is really, really good.
     
    Jaap74 likes this.
  20. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    Please - please - stop sharing details of your bowel movement. This is the classic example of Too Much Information. It's still deeply funny though!

    I confess up front to being no kind of authority on the matter, but certain combinations of activities are generally a bad idea. Drinking and texting, drinking and driving, texting and driving, pooping (as you put it) and posting, All bad!

    Yes! But not while on the toilet.

    Forgive a suggestion, but I think this should have been the first line of the post. That stated, I think you and I and others have plenty to complain about with respect to Tidal. For the past week, I've been getting a Jay-Z popup on screen every time I launch the app or the main web page, despite the fact that all of my preferences and all of my Tidal music listening is strictly jazz and classical. Why am I not getting a login popup containing the latest releases in the genres I always listen to? Bad Tidal!

    You want another complaint? How about the fact that, notwithstanding my comments earlier in this thread about Tidal's efforts to improve its search function, search still sucks! In this day and age, with big data manipulation and management, metadata tagging, and digital content management systems as advanced as they are, I still can't find a significant percentage of albums and tracks that are definitiely there without doing non-intitive search contortions. In Tidal's rush to bulk up its streaming library as quickly as possible, it simply dumped millions of files onto the servers with nothing in the metadata tags except artist name and album name. Now it's spending a ridiculous amount of money to catch up. It's just one more item about which Tidal investors are not happy.

    If I want hi-res streaming in Toronto, where I live, Tidal is the only option. Canada simply does not yet have the population or the consumer density to be of interest to certain kinds of retails and certain kinds of distributors that have to justify infrastructure and licensing costs against potential income. Spotify is already here too, so unless Tidal moves rapidly on significant search function improvements I'll definitely try Spotify if its rumored hi-res streaming shows up.

    Still another complaint? Tidal app implementation comes with a somewhat less than robust SDK (software development kit). A few problems have appeared as a result. For example, if someone has set up a Bluesound Node 2 (an excellent network streamer, BTW) with their Tidal account information, and then sometime later moves the Node 2 to a different location, unplugging the Node 2 and then replugging it dumps the owner out of Tidal. Problem is, when you launch the control app to start playing music again, it appears as though you're still logged in. When the user tries to play something, an internal error message pops up and the system halts. I checked. You've got to logout and login again, but there's no "You are no longer logged in" warning - just a cryptic internal server error. It's a flaw in the SDK. Tidal is "working on it" and will push a bug fix out to licensees "soon". Meh! This kind of rookie software dev error has not business in a front line app for a major streaming service. These are 1990s-type bugs.

    I'm not done yet. While Tidal plows resources into MQA implementation and MQA file intake, it hasn't implemented MQA file search. All the MQA albums and tracks are dumped into a vast "Masters" subcategory - no genre separation, no artist separation. It's faintly dopey. And while I'm on the subject of MQA, Tidal is spending real money on this dubious effort while ignoring 'difficult' artists such as Tool (arguably, one of the most remarkable groups to rise above the entire metal movement) who refuse to make a deal without assurances that their music files will be safe in Tidal's care and without assurances that they'll be paid any more than the pennies-per-play that Tidal typically offers (which admittedly is still more than the fractions of pennies-per-play that competing services pay to artists).

    There's more, but you get the idea. But here's one more anyway. Tidal HiFi, from my limited perspective not as an insider but merely as a subscriber, seemed to be resting on its marketed superiority of sound quality for too long. Its CD quality boast - if you use something like an Auralic Aries or Lumin D1 with their excellent apps that provide a real-time readout of file quality - is a bit of a myth where Tidal HiFi is concerned. Most streams are running between 800-1100 Kbps in FLAC, not 1440 FLAC (the actual CD quality Kbps). In other words, audio quality from Tidal HiFi is very close to CD quality and notably superior in every way to the competing streams from Spotify and other services at 320 Kbps MP3, and vastly superior to typical Internet radio streams that wander vaguely between 96-256 Kbps MP3. But the Tidal HiFi stream is still not full CD quality. By no means a dealbreaker, but still not fully there either.
     
  21. Wired4Fun

    Wired4Fun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cary, NC
    @Agitater agree with all of your points... except please don't take away my ability to poop and post. Really. WTH am I supposed to do while taking some ME time?

    Anyway, I use the TIDAL app on my desktop, and a BlueSound NODE2 and app for my listening room. They both pretty much stink. When I say "I like Tidal", I should clarify that I enjoy the sound. The search function is archaic at best, and the MASTERS selection (which is what I want to play the most of, given its quality!) is impossible to search, and often times disappears altogether, requiring a reboot of the app. FYI, TIDAL blames BlueSound for this, and BlueSound blames TIDAL. Yup.

    I agree most of all with your comment that IF Spotify would introduce a HiRez offering, I would be excited to try it, and likely to switch to it if it had equal sound quality to TIDAL and operated in the way traditional Spotify does now.
     
    Doug Walton likes this.
  22. Doug Walton

    Doug Walton Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    TIDAL HiFi today, for sound quality, and despite their odd UI and annoying and never-ending hip-hop popups.

    When Spotify comes with a HiRez upgrade from Premium, I will instantly drop TIDAL and go with Spotify full-time (we have a Premium plan now but we don't use it much). So much to like about the Spotify user experience and discovery features.
     
  23. Claude Benshaul

    Claude Benshaul Forum Resident

    For a lot of us vintage music lovers, a good poop is often the highlight of the day.
     
    Wired4Fun likes this.
  24. LARGERTHAN

    LARGERTHAN Forum Resident

    Location:
    Eire
    I've used both but have a preference for Spotify, for the following reasons:

    -Superior search function.
    -Their algorithm for suggested content seems superior, in my experience. Weekly Discovery is an absolute treat! Have discovered gems there via that feature.
    -Cheaper.
    -Slightly better UI.
    -Playback quality is sufficient for me, personally. Yes, on the Tidal test feature, I could 5 times out of 5 pick the higher resolution track. Nevertheless, this seeming difference was negligible at best for me personally. Recording provenance is infinitely more important, and sometimes both Spotify and Tidal fall foul, high resolution or not...
     
    Robert C likes this.
  25. Jaap74

    Jaap74 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Might that be because the FLAC is actually compressed ?

    FLAC compression level comparison ยป The Z-Issue
     
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