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 again and a sorta giveaway.
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That’s nice to know, as my streaming preamp supports Tidal. Well, it would do if I actually enabled the feature.
This is another of the not infrequent times when I wonder why I continue to bother with The Dafterword. Square peg in a round hole I guess. I don’t belong here.
What tosh, Mr Squeezer!
I do intended to adopt hi-res streaming at some point, but at the moment I can barely keep up with my CD and vinyl purchases. I plan to retire in six years, if not before.
I’m thinking this may be the last of Spotify for me. Hard to think of anything it has going for it over the competition these days apart from its ubiquity.
The last I heard about Spotify’s much delayed foray into lossless was a proposed price of £19.99 the same price as the soon to be obsolete Hi-Fi Plus tier from Tidal. That seems even less likely to happen now. Spotify were going to offer an extension to the hours available to customers for Audiobook access as an enticement but do people really want that? For that price one could open an account with Tidal or Apple amongst others and an account with Audible for a monthly cost that would be slightly cheaper than the proposed cost of the bundle from Spotify. OK Spotify offer podcasts but they can easily be accessed for free from many sources including without cost from Spotify. Tidal gives access to lossless Flac across the catalogue with an expanding number of albums in Hi-Res plus Dolby Atmos, Sony 360° and an enormous catalogue of video. If you’ve got the audio kit to take advantage of the very noticable uptick in sound quality other streamers offer over Spotify then it seems daft not to try out the competition.
The thing that kept me with Spotify for ages was its recommendations and automagically compiled playlists but they’ve been feeling very stale for some time now so it’s time for a change. It’s cheaper and the sound is better – most of the time, when I’m listening in the car or the kitchen, that won’t make too much of a difference but it’ll be great to be able to indulge myself when I’ve got the time and space and the house to myself.
Just a shame that I don’t have a multichannel streamer to make the most of the Atmos content. Unless there’s a Tidal app on my PS5 or Xbox that will output multichannel audio?
Tidal algorithms have improved immeasurably and I have it on good authority that Tidal’s recommendations and playlist creation is a match for Spotify now. I don’t know if PlayStation has a Tidal app but I know Xbox doesn’t. I think they have one for Apple Music. I don’t use the Atmos content due to not having the kit to take advantage of it. I’m strictly a two channel kind of a guy.
You may find this informative.
This is of interest and appeal, even if my ears are cloth.(Taste? Golden. Apparatus? Less so.) I tried “all” the options when I sickened of Splotty, mainly disappointed by the coverage of my niche listening wants. Apple Music is my current, which has good coverage and “guarantees” to save your library should there be a personal IT Armageddon, as happened a year or two back.
Prepared to be talked out of my allegiance to Jobs relicts.
Nothing wrong with Apple Music as a streamer especially if Classical is your bag. The only hassle can be getting bit perfect streams if that is a priority. John Darko has made a series of videos on the palaver if you’re interested. I tried Apple Music for a month and decided that it wasn’t offering me anything that I couldn’t find on Tidal. I prefer the UI of Tidal and I like Tidal Connect so after trying all the major platforms it’s Tidal I’ve stuck with. Their customer service is good as well. I had an issue with accessing meta data last week and brought it to their attention. Two days later they updated the app and fixed it.
As a fellow Tidal user, I was also pleased by this. I like Tidal; it seems to have virtually everything I look for and I’m led to believe more money goes to the actual artists than is the case with Spotify.
I concur.
Me too obviously.
A nice surprise for once.
I’d heard rumours but suspected it would be for some other part of the world only.
It sure was. I too had heard a rumour but being a flat out cynic I had dismissed it.