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I am thinking of moving to Tidal. The Spotify sound quality is awful for Classical music with their compression/processing unable to deal with complex passages.
by willtim 6y ago
I am thinking of moving to Tidal. The Spotify sound quality is awful for Classical music with their compression/processing unable to deal with complex passages. The Android app also upsamples everything to 48KHz and has occasional random audio glitches. Hopefully Tidal is better.
- kjakm 6y agoSpotify have announced a 'HiFi' service coming later this year. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-22/five-things-to-know-about-spotify-hifi/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-22/five-things-to-know-...
- leetcrew 6y agowhy tidal is particular? as far as I can tell, amazon music HD is the same thing for substantially less money.
- willtim 6y agoThe marketing for this one hasn't reached me yet. Thanks for the recommendation. EDIT: looks like Amazon HD might force re-sampling of 44.1KHz to 48KHz on Android, which is a shame if true.
- leetcrew 6y agounfortunately, I don't think any of the streaming services offer the same level of control and confidence as something like foobar2000 with a local library. when I was originally shopping for a streaming service, I found it very frustrating to figure out all the technical details. they don't make this information at all easy to find, and even if they do, it's hard to trust that something weird doesn't happen under the hood on some devices. my main use case for streaming is android auto, so I lowered my criteria to "no lossy-lossy reencode for bluetooth and works well with google assistant". so yt music was basically the only option for me. I would have tried amazon HD, but apparently google has deliberately made it hard to use with assistant, which hamstrings it for music in the car.
- svantana 6y agoIn case you missed it, there is an audio quality section in Spotify's Settings menu, and the default is "automatic", which might not be the highest. I'm not sure but I think the "very high" setting is 320kbps ogg, which I've never heard of anyone being able to discriminate from lossless in a blind test. Also, Spotify is coming out with lossless later this year. (not affiliated with spotify and not very pleased with the service in general myself, just saying.)
- willtim 6y agoI have it set to "Very High" and have their normalisation turned off. I can provide samples demonstrating distortion and break-up; the waveforms even look completely different visually. It's even audible over non-audiophile headphones. On my HD800S it's unlistenable. I have no idea what they are doing to the sound, but I have found many recordings that sound awful on both Android and Windows.
- raverbashing 6y agoThen I'd think it's the "audio watermarking" some companies insist on using. Because for some rights holders, you're paying for their product but f-you nonetheless. Edit: watermarking not fingerprinting
- xnx 6y agoFingerprinting or watermarking?
- SSLy 6y agoWould you be able to share specific passages? The neighbour commenter mentioned fingerprinting, it might be that or bad master.
- willtim 6y agoSure, one example is the first minute opening of Osmo Vanska's Mahler 5. The big crescendo between 40-45 seconds sounds particularly bad, lots of break-up and distortion. Sounds fantastic on the CD.
- joubert 6y agoTidal sound quality is unparalleled IMO. I’ve got a good set of speakers, and coupled with Tidal’s Master[1] quality recordings, there’s just no way I can go back to something of lower sound fidelity. [1] https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TIDAL-MASTERS-AND-MASTER-QUALITY-AUDIO https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TID...
- mft_ 6y agoCan I ask what your system is, to feed the speakers?
- thisisnico 6y agoCouldn't agree more :)
- threeseed 6y agoI am the opposite. On my Focal Clear there is no advantage for Tidal over Apple Music. Would be curious to see if you can pass this test: http://abx.digitalfeed.net http://abx.digitalfeed.net Because what people fail to understand is that from source -> listener there are multiple points at which information is lost. People obsess over the file format but not over which DAC they use or whether Apple, Spotify, Tidal has better encoding capabilities.
- aparashk 6y agoThere is some subjectivity to it, but yes, I agree from experience. Have both Apple Music, for the kids, and TIDAL for myself, BTW.
- hudo 6y agoQobuz should be best for Classical and Jazz ... I have Tidal on the droid and never had any glitches.
- willtim 6y agoThanks for the recommendation. I see that Qobuz also integrates with UAPP on Android (which gets around the 48Khz limit). Since I listen to mainly Jazz and Classical, it sounds like a good fit.
- luckycharms810 6y agoI would highly recommend Qobuz. Great company, ownership that cares about artists and music.
- willtim 6y agoI can confirm Qobuz sounds great. I've signed up for a free trial. The integration with UAPP on Android works well and gets around the Android 48Khz limitation. Thanks for the recommendation.
- fallingknife 6y agoWhy do you need to pay for a streaming service for classical music? Isn't it all public domain by now?
- teodorlu 6y agoRecordings are often recent.
- tzs 6y agoThe underlying music for a large fraction of classical music is public domain now (but not all...classical music never stopped being composed). But copyright can also cover the performance itself, not just the underlying music. So even though Beethoven's 9th symphony has long been public domain, for example, the Telarc recording of it by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Celeveland Orchestra & Chorus is not. If you want to do something with that specific recording, you need permission. Also, a particular arrangement might be copyrighted. Consider Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". That was composed as a piano piece in 1874, and long ago became public domain. Since then, numerous other composers have arranged it for orchestra, with the most well known arrangement probably being Maurice Ravel's in 1922. There have been dozens of other orchestrations including several this century, and also numerous arrangements for other types of groups and combinations of instruments and solo instruments. A given recording will only be public domain if the underlying work, the arrangement, and the performance are all public domain.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y agoPerformance aside, plenty of classical works aren't out of copyright. My favourite composer, Herbert Howells, died in 1983; his works won't be out of copyright until 2053.
- notyourwork 6y agoAmazon Music offers higher resolution music.
- maxerickson 6y agoYou left out 'repeatedly'. Ticks me off that there is no way to disable ads in the app.
- notyourwork 6y agoAds? Not sure what you're referencing here.
- maxerickson 6y agoI pay for Amazon Music. On my (Android) phone, I get modal 'upgrade offers' on a regular basis. Ads.
- notyourwork 6y agoIf you pay for it what are you getting an ad for? If you pay for Prime, you are getting access to a limited catalog of music. Unlimited subscription offers a full catalog of music and no ads.
- maxerickson 6y agoI pay for Amazon Music, like I said in my other comment. I'm not talking about Amazon Music Prime. The app literally has full screen ads to upgrade the service to HD and so on. They are occasional, but they are ads. There's no option in the settings to disable them.
- nr2x 6y agoQobuz is amazing for classical.
- nvarsj 6y agoSpotify is pretty much bottom of the barrel if you're a music album fan, I think. I find it's only good at playing random songs on giant playlists, or playing the radio. Managing a library of albums is a huge pain and I still don't understand how it's supposed to work. Then there is the problem of questionable digital masters. There's 0 transparency into the mastering process and what Spotify uses. As you've observed, some things just sound really awful on Spotify. If you really want the best, I suggest Roon + Tidal subscription for playback. Then use Qobuz/Bandcamp/etc. to purchase lossless FLACs to import into Roon, or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality, and you can be certain the source quality is good. You can use Tidal lossless for streaming things you don't buy (but the selection is much more limited). The Roon UX is way, way better than Spotify for managing a large collection of albums.
- willtim 6y agoThanks for the recommendations. I'm still very new to streaming and still buy CDs for most of my music. I am currently using UAPP on my phone and plug it straight into an RME ADI-2 DAC, the advantage being I don't have to fire up the PC. The disadvantage of course is storage on the phone.
- nvarsj 6y agoRoon sounds like it would be great for you - but you'll have to spend some time and money on setting it up. I have all my music in lossless FLAC on a Synology NAS and run the Roon server on there. The Roon client should work on your phone and connect to your RME ADI-2 DAC as well (great DAC btw, I'd really like one myself). It handles lossless streaming, and ensuring the digital chain is optimized for quality all the way to your DAC. It can also apply arbitrary parametric EQ on the server side, in case you want to use some EQ profiles for your HD800s if you don't have the RME handy.
- 015a 6y agoAudirvana is another app which competes with Roon. Audirvana is a one-time fee of $100, versus Roon's subscription model (or, I think, ~$800 lifetime subscription, which is pretty up there). I think the big thing both Roon and Audirvana achieve sub-optimally is just overall application performance and user experience. They do have a ton of features which help in managing massive audio libraries, far better than Spotify or Tidal alone. But, Roon legitimately feels like a browser app they threw in an iframe and nativefied. Audirvana is better IMO, but isn't as good as Roon at auto-discovering album artwork and metadata-ifying the connections between your local songs for hyperlinking and discovery. The critical thing that I love about that methodology of music playback is the "synthesis" they both do of Tidal and your local music. There is a ton of music out there that's inaccessible on (all!) streaming services, and every audiophile I know eventually starts amassing a collection of lossless files from Bandcamp/etc. Neither a streaming service nor your local library alone is ever the "complete" view into all the music you want to enjoy; you need both, synthesized into one integrated view. Google Play Music used to be a decent solution to this, not the greatest quality but it solved this problem well, but then Google nerfed it into the ground. There's still a lot of work to be done in this domain. To be honest, my go-to for local music playback is the same app I've been using for a decade after the fall of Winamp; Foobar (Windows). Its simple, ridiculously performant, infinitely customizable, and works great.
- mayneack 6y agoAfter the end of google music, I switched to Tidal + Plex. It's great for library organization, custom dynamic playlists, and mixing personal files with streaming.
- aparashk 6y agoI have Plex lifetime sub and TIDAL sub, but never explored them in combination. Where would I start to learn more? Have you compared to Roon's or Audirvana's integration of TIDAL?
- mayneack 6y agoI haven't, but this thread got roon on my list to explore. I've used plex for movies for years, and google music's end got me looking for new things. I have two music libraries: tidal and my own music (I'm using about 80% my own music). The music is well tagged already using picard, so I don't know how well that works out of the box. When I'm in the tidal library, I usually will mark an album/artist to be added to my normal music library and then it will start showing up there mixed in with my self hosted stuff. The killer features (to me) are 1: playing by album instead of by track. I use the "random album" shuffle all the time and usually want to listen to an album all at once and 2: smart playlist builder which lets me make dynamic playlists around how many times I've played a thing, my personal rating, or when the last time I played it was. https://imgur.com/a/7zchJC7 https://imgur.com/a/7zchJC7 https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
- kennywinker 6y agoWhile I'm no audiophile, I switched to tidal recently for another music-loving reason - they pay a larger share to artists.
- IvyMike 6y agoI moved to Tidal when Spotify decided to blow huge amounts of cash getting into the "exclusive podcast business" while still paying peanuts to most artists. Tidal pays musicians something like 3x what spotify does. [0] This is probably still not enough, but at least it's the right direction. The higher sound quality has just been a bonus. [0] https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
- aparashk 6y agoDid not know this, thanks for the info, makes me even happier with my TIDAL subscription!
- aparashk 6y agoMy experience has been that TIDAL CD quality streams are of great quality, and some of the MQA ones are brilliant. Of course, a lot depends on the master quality, that seems to be the key these days as a lot of the sound compressionist's work has been automated by tools.
- isolli 6y agoIf you're looking for classical music specifically, I would recommend a dedicated service. For instance, I use Idagio and I'm very happy with them (there are others of course). The killer feature is curated metadata, dedicated to classical music: searching and browsing is infinitely superior. You can select a specific work and browse all its recordings. You can select a performer and view all their recordings. You can select a composer and filter their works by type, etc.