[jsplice]

I used to have tidal in the past but recently picked up a subscription again. I've been noticing inconsistent quality between albums. For example, this evening I was listening to a Norah Jones album via Tidal, and it sounded like lossless quality to me. I then went and played Bill Evans A Portrait in Jazz, and it was downright horrible. It sounded like I was listening to an MP3 that was encoded with a free encoder written back in 1997. Just horrible. Compression artifacts abound. The brushes on the snare drum sounded like rain drops hitting the vinyl siding on my house. I then pulled up my own personal lossless copy of the album to listen as a reference, and it was night and day. I was shocked to find this out, as while I was steaming from Tidal, it clearly indicated to me from the icon that it was in "hifi". It'll take more than an icon to convince audiophiles that they are actually listening to lossless quality.

I then did the same comparison with another Bill Evans album, Explorations. Same exact result. I still can't believe the difference in quality. Anyone who has spent time listening to MP3s since their rise in popularity back in the 90s knows what I mean by "compression artifacts." It's hard to describe what it sounds like by its very audible.

My only guess here is that Tidal simply does not have every single album in their library encoded as lossless. I am not completely opposed to that, but it is deceptive and immoral to make a user think that he or she is getting a "hifi" lossless stream when they are clearly not.

Has anyone else experienced this?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[silversurfer6]

I was surprised to find out that even though you pay for hifi streaming you have to manually setup some of the options in settings.

Are you using a pc, mac, android or ios?

This is from ios:

 

[silversurfer6]

I am guessing you checked the settings already but it was the only thing I could have suggested.

 

[silversurfer6]

I will try to do some testing as well vs physical CDs to see if there is a difference to my ears

 

[Staxaphone]

I agree with your assessment.  I tried tidal but thought the quality was on par with XM radio.  I can't believe there are so many "audiophiles" who don't hear this.  But then again there are many audiophiles with some degree of hearing loss (or at least high frequency loss) who don't realize it or just wont accept it. Put out the ads and reviews telling them how great it sounds and by golly they can hear for themselves how good it sounds.

 

[jsplice]

I am guessing you checked the settings already but it was the only thing I could have suggested.

Yea, I made sure I had that all set to Hifi in the settings.  By default, my wifi streaming setting was Hifi, but cellular was not.  I don't mind that, since I won't have enough data in my plan to use Hifi over cellular anyhow. However, just to make sure there was no issues with the app itself, I do have it all set to Hifi now.
 
I need to start putting "Hifi" in quotes when referring to Tidal's own term, because I certainly don't concur with their description.
 
I've been listening to a few albums on Tidal that did in fact sound like lossless to me.  But it is very hit or miss.  And my previous theory of being "downgraded" during times of heavy server load is disproven now, since I can hear the same quality over and over again.  And again, if in fact Tidal had to downgrade users from true Hifi to a lesser quality under times of heavy server load, they still need to remove the "Hifi" icon from the player when it happens.

 

[jegnyc]

Have you tried this (if it is relevant to your set-up?

http://www.head-fi.org/t/790382/guide-properly-setting-up-tidal-for-best-sound-quality-when-using-a-usb-dac

Also, at least with respect to Bill Evans, can you be sure that Tidal has the same mastering as your lossless version?

Edit - should have linked to this specific post.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/790382/guide-properly-setting-up-tidal-for-best-sound-quality-when-using-a-usb-dac/15#post_12315472