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Tidal again and a sorta giveaway.

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To those few amongst you who may be interested I’ve just received an email from Tidal informing me that from 10th April they are rolling their Hi-fi tier and Hi-fi Plus tier into one single tier and charging one price. In the UK access to all the various bells and whistles will be £10.99 per month. That’s a saving of £9.00 per month for subscribers to the Hi-fi Plus tier. Not everyday something gets cheaper… Also while I’m here I have three one month subscriptions to Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker Substack on er…Substack to give away. If you want one PM me your email address and I’ll sort it out. First come first served.

Tidal Flac.

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Tidal flac is now a reality for hi-res streaming. With the demise of MQA this was inevitable and I for one couldn’t be happier. I have never been convinced by MQA. I could see the point of it if bandwidth was an issue but it isn’t so all I and many others have wanted from Tidal is hi-res flac. Neither of my external Dacs are MQA compliant that’s how much I deemed MQA a necessity. So here’s the burning question Can I hear a difference? I played the latest offering from Terrace Martin this morning through headphones and it sounded sublime at 24bit/64k but it’s early days yet and I need to do a lot more listening before I finally nail my colours. Why you may ask haven’t I simply switched to Amazon or Qobuz instead of waiting for Tidal to see sense and ditch MQA? Well firstly they haven’t exactly ditched it. It’s still available as they add hi-res flac alongside it. I believe they currently have an offering of six million songs in hi-res flac with more being added all the while to the current catalogue of over 100 million tracks. Secondly I just prefer the UI of » Continue Reading.

Tidal alternative to Spotify

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Im not really interested in the Rogan/Young spat. I never listen to Rogan so I feel I’m not in a position to have a valid opinion. However it did get me thinking about moving off Spotify to another service if only to try to break the grip Spotify seem to have on the streaming industry – and you know, change is as good as a rest and all that. So I have taken the free trial for Tidal (finally swayed by the fact that they have the wonderful Cardiacs Sing to God and spotify dont. )

I have lots of playlists on Spotify but SongShift is a tool for migrating – and checking through my playlists I realised I never play nearly all of them.

I have checked on the most obscure artists I can and it seems pretty much equal with a few exceptions (like Cardiacs). Most of my favourite spotify missing artists are also missing on Tidal – I suspect for similar reasons – (no Apple Venus, no “From Gardens where we feel secure” ).

Oh and the “family plan” for both services is the same price. Tidal pay artists (or rights holders) slightly better but its still » Continue Reading.

ATM: Sonos question (supplementary: Tidal)

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I’ve got a big birthday coming up soon, and Mrs thep, who is a woman of great empathy as well as taste, has hinted that she’s thinking of buying me another Sonos Play:5 so that we’ll have a stereo pair. (She loves the one we’ve already got so much that I suspect this embarrassingly generous gesture is not entirely disinterested, but never mind.)

Has anybody got experience of what happens when you put two Sonoses (Sonoi?) together? Is it aural heaven, or is the difference not particularly obvious? The one we’ve got sounds so impressive that I find it hard to believe that it isn’t already pumping it out in stereo, and they cost an awful lot…

But in anticipation of all this hifi goodness I’ve been fooling around with a month’s free trial of Tidal’s hifi streaming, which claims to be CD quality, but costs twice as much as Spotify. Certainly the remastered Sgt Pepper sounds very impressive, with Sir Thumbsaloft’s bass positively leaping out, but then I thought it sounded pretty good on Spotify too. If you try direct track-for-track comparison Tidal often sounds subjectively ‘better’, but not always, and I was always perfectly happy when I listened » Continue Reading.