Tidal

[Blacksabbath25]

I am trying Tidal on a 28 days free trail and using the option for £20 a month which is meant to be the best quality I take it ? It’s the first time I’ve tried a streaming site .

question are all of the albums on tidal high res albums ? Or is it just the classical albums

I’ve noticed that if you listen to a live album there is a slight gap between tracks is this normal ? And is there a setting to set it to gap less ?

Is using the hifi setting on the app is this to do with quality ? As I have it set to hifi

can you custom the app so you only get what interests you

And do you think it’s worth £20 a month ? Or should I look at Spotify which is cheaper or something else

 

[hybridauth_Facebook_100004211376004]

Hi Sabbath.I think getting gapless playback is down to your streaming device and not tidals own interface.I haven't used tidal as yet but wouldn't mind giving it a try (Spotify user)if they get a family plan option up and running like Spotify I could be tempted....but again the Spotify library is hard to beat and I can't really complain about the Sq of it's extreme setting.

 

[Pedro]

Hi Sabbath.I think getting gapless playback is down to your streaming device and not tidals own interface.I haven't used tidal as yet but wouldn't mind giving it a try (Spotify user)if they get a family plan option up and running like Spotify I could be tempted....but again the Spotify library is hard to beat and I can't really complain about the Sq of it's extreme setting. 

I moved from Tidal to Spotify (much better classical catalogue).

Tidal does have a family plan. Here it costs 20.99€/month (5 members). Never tried it though.

 

[Blacksabbath25]

Hi Sabbath.I think getting gapless playback is down to your streaming device and not tidals own interface.I haven't used tidal as yet but wouldn't mind giving it a try (Spotify user)if they get a family plan option up and running like Spotify I could be tempted....but again the Spotify library is hard to beat and I can't really complain about the Sq of it's extreme setting.

is that a setting on my Yamaha WXC50 that I will have to adjust to get gap less ?

 

[hybridauth_Facebook_100004211376004]

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the yami Sabbath.I can't help I'm afraid...

Pedro thanks for that info . just checked and the family plan is £15 per month rising to £30 for the cd quality plan.mmmmmm!

 

[Blacksabbath25]

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the yami Sabbath.I can't help I'm afraid...

Pedro thanks for that info . just checked and the family plan is £15 per month rising to £30 for the hi res plan.mmmmmm!

the issue is how do you no if your getting what you paid for quality wise as I can’t see anywhere on the album if it’s the highest quality and I noticed that what hifi has done a tips and tricks on tidal .

what hifi says that you get more settings on a desktop then on a iPad and to make sure if your paying £20 a month to make sure your getting the quality your paying for as some albums are high-res and some are lossless

maybe someone can explain what’s the difference between high-res and lossless please

 

[insider9]

Tidal is CD quality. Hardly any high resolution track and even these will be sent to Yamaha at CD quality. Press the 3 slider icon in the bottom right of Musiccast app to open Sound Settings and scroll down and switch Audio Information on. This will show you FLAC 44.1 kHz for Tidal files.

Gapless...
This is where it gets tricky. It's not just the Yamaha but a number of streamer that can't do Tidal gapless. There is a way though. It will however cost you £5 (approximately). Before Yamaha introduced native support to Tidal I've used an app called BubbleUPnp. You can actually download the free version and use it before committing to buy. It will do Tidal gapless. I use it whenever I listen to an album that requires gapless.

 

[insider9]

You can use Yamaha as a Roon endpoint. It's not Roon Ready but because it has Airplay it can act as an endpoint. That means you can send gapless Tidal with room correction etc. via your home network.

If you want to try Roon HB Channel has a 2 month free trial code under one of recent Roon videos on YouTube. If you can't find it let me know.

 

[Blacksabbath25]

You can use Yamaha as a Roon endpoint. It's not Roon Ready but because it has Airplay it can act as an endpoint. That means you can send gapless Tidal with room correction etc. via your home network.

If you want to try Roon HB Channel has a 2 month free trial code under one of recent Roon videos on YouTube. If you can't find it let me know.

at the moment I am using my iPad to pick the albums which it’s going though my Yamaha wxc50 though my Yamaha CD player which has a better Dac then the wxc50 .

but basically I do not want to wast money and pay £20 a month if I am not benefiting from the hi-res stuff I wanted the best possible quality from the Yamaha wxc50 .

at the moment I am listening to some led zeppelin albums I’ve never heard and they do sound good

 

[Gray]

You can use Yamaha as a Roon endpoint. It's not Roon Ready but because it has Airplay it can act as an endpoint. That means you can send gapless Tidal with room correction etc. via your home network.

If you want to try Roon HB Channel has a 2 month free trial code under one of recent Roon videos on YouTube. If you can't find it let me know.

Is it any wonder that people get confused with all this? The more advanced we get, the more faff seems necessary. Think what it must be like for those less geeky than the average forumite here.

 

[insider9]

You got the impression Tidal was hi-res. The Hifi tier as it's called is CD quality. It had an addition of MQA earlier this year but for that you'd need either desktop app or a compliant device like a Bluesound Node 2.

Qobuz on the other hand has a big hi-res library from what I've read.

 

[insider9]

You can use Yamaha as a Roon endpoint. It's not Roon Ready but because it has Airplay it can act as an endpoint. That means you can send gapless Tidal with room correction etc. via your home network.

If you want to try Roon HB Channel has a 2 month free trial code under one of recent Roon videos on YouTube. If you can't find it let me know.

Is it any wonder that people get confused with all this? The more advanced we get, the more faff seems necessary. Think what it must be like for those less geeky than the average forumite here.

I appreciate where you're coming from. This is simply unavoidable and what works for one person will be too simple/difficult (delete as appropriate) for another.

The truth is in digital age audio quality is usually an afterthought. Convenience is always the priority. Hardly ever you come across a product such as Roon that puts sound quality as a priority but provides top quality user experience.

 

[hybridauth_Facebook_100004211376004]

Yeah.i've download a few hi res albums from Qobuz and they do have options for streaming the hi res stuff...but as insider says...it's a bit more difficult to get it to your stereo....but I think I heard somewhere it's going to be on chromecast....and it's not cheap for the hi res streaming options.but their download prices are very competitive compared to.....HD tracks for example.

 

[Blacksabbath25]

You got the impression Tidal was hi-res. The Hifi tier as it's called is CD quality. It had an addition of MQA earlier this year but for that you'd need either desktop app or a compliant device like a Bluesound Node 2.

Qobuz on the other hand has a big hi-res library from what I've read.

I just thought tidal is meant to be the best sound quality streaming site there is ? Is Spotify the same as Tidal in sound quality as I do not have glue it’s all new to me . I’ve been playing with my CDs for so long and a bit of iTunes download steaming that I’ve brought .

 

[QuestForThe13thNote]

Sorry if I’m repeating previous answers coming in late but I’d add this. The point of tidal as blacksabbath is clearly trying, is to get better sq. Whether tidal is better than Spotify will depend on the system and its worth a try of both, if you can. I tried Apple Music and Spotify on a sonos connect , such a sonos which I’ve since dispensed with and admittedly I went to tidal through my cyrus streamer , but tidal is clearly better.

But in my experience of trying a node2 in my system and mqa hi res unpacked tracks, the difference to CD quality tidal hi Fi streaming is marginal if nothing. I wouldn’t bother looking at tidal for the sake of hi res as you won’t get it in your system blacksabbath, and whether it’s decent in systems is really the preserve of very high priced sources and amps in my opinion, much more than node 2s. Whether tidal gives benefits atm in hi Fi systems in an issue of very very good hi Fi. If people think they are hearing very good differences in mqa over cd and cd streamed stuff using devices like a node2 and they’ve got a good system already, with good upscaling dacs, they are lying.

Look at tidal for sq purposes if it gives benefits, but otherwise I’d go to lower bit rate Spotify. You’d save cash.

 

[insider9]

You got the impression Tidal was hi-res. The Hifi tier as it's called is CD quality. It had an addition of MQA earlier this year but for that you'd need either desktop app or a compliant device like a Bluesound Node 2.

Qobuz on the other hand has a big hi-res library from what I've read.

I just thought tidal is meant to be the best sound quality streaming site there is  ? Is Spotify the same as Tidal in sound quality as I do not have glue it’s all new to me  . I’ve been playing with my CDs for so long and a bit of iTunes download steaming that I’ve brought  .

It's better quality than Spotify, Deezer, Google Play, Apple Music, etc. which are all lossy.

Tidal and Qobuz are the only lossless services. Deezer offers Elite service which is also lossless but it's a Sonos exclusive.

If you're looking for discovery or don't listen attentively Spotify is good enough. If you're looking for a good way to supplement your CD library it's Tidal all the way.

 

[Paulq]

Blacksabbath - I subscribe to Tidal Hi-Fi and have done for quite a while. It was confusing to me at first but the easiest way to think about it is that Tidal Hi-Fi will be broadly the same quality as if you were playing CD's, even if you have to just use your Yamaha WXC rather than the DAC in your CD player. Your stuff is easily good enough to do justice to what Tidal can throw at it.

Whilst Tidal doesn't (yet) have the same sized catalogue as Spotify it streams at a higher quality than Spotify does, at least in theory if you concur that there is an audible difference between 320 bit mp3's/OGG and FLAC files. I certainly do and this was a factor in my choosing Tidal over Spotify.

The good thing about Tidal over Qobuz (I have had both) is that it tends to have a lot of the classic rock artists catalogues without too many omissions, I am guessing from your username that may be quite appealing for you

. I listen to a lot of that along with other genres and find Tidal entirely adequate.

Qobuz is great if you want to purchase hi-res audio. There is a definite leaning towards classical music with it but there is also a growing amount of rock etc becoming available.

You'll also see some of the albums in the Tidal desktop app denoted with an 'M' in a square box, These are Tidal Masters and are MQA files (well, mostly) and, again, it's argued that they are of higher quality than the rest of the Tidal catalogue. As others have said, to take advantage of these at their intended resolution, you'll need a device capable of decoding MQA. Your Yamaha isn't.

However, to reassure you and encourage you not to get too caught up in all that, I own a Meridian Prime Headphone amp that is capable of decoding MQA and I would describe the difference that I can hear as negligible to nothing at all. There are some albums where I think it's better but I wouldn't be rushing to subscribe purely on the basis of the MQA/Higher res content. Tidal HiFi's native CD quality is adequate.

Hope that helps. In essence, and if I were you, I'd flog it to death for your free month then decide if you think it's worth £20/month. I pay that quite happily and am quite satisfied with it.

Good luck with it. I believe the new Black Sabbath live album will be on Tidal soon so your timing is perfect!

 

[Blacksabbath25]

Blacksabbath - I subscribe to Tidal Hi-Fi and have done for quite a while. It was confusing to me at first but the easiest way to think about it is that Tidal Hi-Fi will be broadly the same quality as if you were playing CD's, even if you have to just use your Yamaha WXC rather than the DAC in your CD player. Your stuff is easily good enough to do justice to what Tidal can throw at it.

Whilst Tidal doesn't (yet) have the same sized catalogue as Spotify it streams at a higher quality than Spotify does, at least in theory if you concur that there is an audible difference between 320 bit mp3's/OGG and FLAC files. I certainly do and this was a factor in my choosing Tidal over Spotify.

The good thing about Tidal over Qobuz (I have had both) is that it tends to have a lot of the classic rock artists catalogues without too many omissions, I am guessing from your username that may be quite appealing for you . I listen to a lot of that along with other genres and find Tidal entirely adequate.

Qobuz is great if you want to purchase hi-res audio. There is a definite leaning towards classical music with it but there is also a growing amount of rock etc becoming available.

You'll also see some of the albums in the Tidal desktop app denoted with an 'M' in a square box, These are Tidal Masters and are MQA files (well, mostly) and, again, it's argued that they are of higher quality than the rest of the Tidal catalogue. As others have said, to take advantage of these at their intended resolution, you'll need a device capable of decoding MQA. Your Yamaha isn't.

However, to reassure you and encourage you not to get too caught up in all that, I own a Meridian Prime Headphone amp that is capable of decoding MQA and I would describe the difference that I can hear as negligible to nothing at all. There are some albums where I think it's better but I wouldn't be rushing to subscribe purely on the basis of the MQA/Higher res content. Tidal HiFi's native CD quality is adequate.

Hope that helps. In essence, and if I were you, I'd flog it to death for your free month then decide if you think it's worth £20/month. I pay that quite happily and am quite satisfied with it.

Good luck with it. I believe the new Black Sabbath live album will be on Tidal soon so your timing is perfect!

yes thanks for the help

my Yamaha CD player will play 24bit cds and the Dac is very good so that’s why I use that instead of the Yamaha wxc50 Dac

so in a nutshell I am basically getting CD quality or would you say SACD quality as I have played some guitar type albums on the jazz section and the quality was very good like I’ve got the guitar in my room .

then what I did was find stuff that I own like led zeppelin , pink floyd , David Gilmore to see if theses artists were any better from the cd version I found them to be a little better then cd quality some albums more then others .

i have not put tidal on my pc yet so I do not no about the different options for settings and so on ive basically only setup the tidal between iPad and wxc50

and obviously I am finding new albums and deluxe albums of bands I like . I’ve listened to led zeppelin live at the bbc , the new David Gilmore live album which sounded very good .

I think I will stick with tidal for a couple of weeks and then try Spotify to see if it’s any better I understand it’s cheaper then tidal but you can just do the basics Tidal for £10 a month

 

[hybridauth_Facebook_100004211376004]

OK.Mr Sabbath...it's looking like you're starting to dabble in the world of streaming....might I suggest before you go much further..start ripping all your discs to your pc in a lossless format....wav or flac.do it at your leisure now and when you start really getting into the way you are going to start listening to music in maybe a year or two...it's all going to be there and ready to ship over to a nas drive......you will thank me later.lol.

 

[newlash09]

As insider9 and Paulq mentioned, the tidal quality maxes out at 44.1Khz FLAC. I use tidal mqa through the bluesound powernode, and I find it to be better than normal tidal tracks. However I don't have any HD or Hires downloads of the same tracks to consider Hires vs mqa. I especially find the noise floor much lower in mqa. You can experiment and see what you make of it.

Despite mqa's superior sound quality , I don't use it much as the content is limited at the present. Besides the wxc-50 does not have mqa at present. But in my opinion the difference is not so huge ( but is definitely there to my ears ) to justify investing in a separate streamer just for mqa.

 

[drummerman]

Tidal has better sq than spotify. That's indisputable, technically at least.

Spotify still has the better user interface/engine.

If Spotify ever do the long promised lossless I'd go there. Until then Tidal rules imho but Quobuz has good reviews too, especially if you like classical.

 

[Leeps]

OK.Mr Sabbath...it's looking like you're starting to dabble in the world of streaming....might I suggest before you go much further..start ripping all your discs to your pc in a lossless format....wav or flac.do it at your leisure now and when you start really getting into the way you are going to start listening to music in maybe a year or two...it's all going to be there and ready to ship over to a nas drive......you will thank me later.lol.

Why would you need to do that? You can just select an album you have already on CD through Tidal, click the favourite heart icon and it's there in your albums tab on Tidal. Sorted. Yes stuff can disappear, but this has been very rare indeed in my experience with Tidal over the past few years. Pretty much all the albums I own on CD are available on Tidal except a couple of albums by the Unthanks which I still have to play on CD, but that's not too onerous.

For me anyway, the whole appeal of using such a comprehensive service like Tidal was that I didn't have to bother with ripping, tagging, renaming, backups, hard drives and all that faff.

BTW Black Sabbath, the app will have a little indicator labelled 'HIFI'. When it's lit up, it indicates that the source is 16/44 CD quality. By far the majority of stuff on Tidal is this quality. If for some reason the album was only ever available in 320kbps mp3, the HIFI indicator will not be lit up.

I think my main gripe with Tidal compared with Spotify is its hip-hop heavy front end. I can't stand hip-hop, so I use the 'Explore' button to search new music in the genres I do like. So there's much less personalisation than Spotify. But actually the catalogue is very comprehensive, so if you search for random stuff, it's very often there. Even finding low-key artists through YouTube channels like Mahogany Sessions, NPR Tiny Desk Concerts or Sofar Sounds, many of the artists I listen to there are on Tidal, so it's catalogue is pretty good.

But Spotify's regular emails asking you to try albums it's based on your own taste in music is very good and I do miss that. For searching for new music, I tend to look beyond Tidal in magazines or YouTube, then select the artist I've found in Tidal. One thing I enjoy when reading hifi reviews is to select the piece of music the reviewer is listening to. You can pick up some pretty obscure things this way and it can broaden your musical choices. But doing this would have been impossible in the days of CD.

As for downloading music, I personally think that will end up having a far shorter life than CD.

 

[Blacksabbath25]

OK.Mr Sabbath...it's looking like you're starting to dabble in the world of streaming....might I suggest before you go much further..start ripping all your discs to your pc in a lossless format....wav or flac.do it at your leisure now and when you start really getting into the way you are going to start listening to music in maybe a year or two...it's all going to be there and ready to ship over to a nas drive......you will thank me later.lol.

Why would you need to do that? You can just select an album you have already on CD through Tidal, click the favourite heart icon and it's there in your albums tab on Tidal. Sorted. Yes stuff can disappear, but this has been very rare indeed in my experience with Tidal over the past few years. Pretty much all the albums I own on CD are available on Tidal except a couple of albums by the Unthanks which I still have to play on CD, but that's not too onerous.

For me anyway, the whole appeal of using such a comprehensive service like Tidal was that I didn't have to bother with ripping, tagging, renaming, backups, hard drives and all that faff.

BTW Black Sabbath, the app will have a little indicator labelled 'HIFI'. When it's lit up, it indicates that the source is 16/44 CD quality. By far the majority of stuff on Tidal is this quality. If for some reason the album was only ever available in 320kbps mp3, the HIFI indicator will not be lit up.

I think my main gripe with Tidal compared with Spotify is its hip-hop heavy front end. I can't stand hip-hop, so I use the 'Explore' button to search new music in the genres I do like. So there's much less personalisation than Spotify. But actually the catalogue is very comprehensive, so if you search for random stuff, it's very often there. Even finding low-key artists through YouTube channels like Mahogany Sessions, NPR Tiny Desk Concerts or Sofar Sounds, many of the artists I listen to there are on Tidal, so it's catalogue is pretty good.

But Spotify's regular emails asking you to try albums it's based on your own taste in music is very good and I do miss that. For searching for new music, I tend to look beyond Tidal in magazines or YouTube, then select the artist I've found in Tidal. One thing I enjoy when reading hifi reviews is to select the piece of music the reviewer is listening to. You can pick up some pretty obscure things this way and it can broaden your musical choices. But doing this would have been impossible in the days of CD.

As for downloading music, I personally think that will end up having a far shorter life than CD.

I am with you about the Hip op Rap header which not me .

i do not own this CD but listening to Eric Clapton’s live unplugged and that sounds very good but normal taste is classic rock , blues ,heavy metal which they are not normally good for SQ but found stuff that sounds ok for the kind of music I listen too .

But the last thing I want to do is pay though the noise for a SQ I am not getting for £20 a month which is a lot of money anyway I will put tidal on my pc to find out if there different settings for quality but sure it’s the same as the iPad app .

 

[Gonepostal]

Apologies for piggy backing into your thread but wanted to know if Tidal works if you use air play from my iPad, or do you only benefit from the superior SQ if you use a wired connection, ie plugging my iPad into a USB port on my amp.

 

[insider9]

Apologies for piggy backing into your thread but wanted to know if Tidal works if you use air play from my iPad, or do you only benefit from the superior SQ if you use a wired connection, ie plugging my iPad into a USB port on my amp. 

Tidal will work via Airplay. Airplay is not designed with sound quality in mind. But there shouldn't be much wrong with using it if not going over CD quality. It will be resampled to 48kHz which is used in Airplay.

However it's best to use, in BS case, native Tidal support on a Yamaha from Musiccast app and not use Airplay.