Review: The "Tidal" Wave - 'HIFI'delity Streaming Is Here To Stay
I heard of the streaming music application "Tidal" through Head-Fi member, Dixter as well as various audio websites on the internet.
I have been trying out just about every music playback application that has been mentioned on Head-Fi, and have found the best sounding offline, local music playback application (Neutron) and it has not been 'beaten' yet regarding overall sound quality, but I was only limited to Spotify for great sounding streaming music for a great price ($5 per month if you are a college student). There was nothing even remotely close to an application that could best Spotify regarding having an all-around stellar listening experience, until I listened to the "Tidal" streaming music service.
After reading a couple of recommendations for the service, I thought, why not try it out?
I tried out the streaming service Tidal tonight, and here are my findings (tested on my iPhone 6, 128GB iOS 8.1):
Very good music quality, as the HIFI setting (when the song is playing in HIFI mode, shown as lit on the bottom right of Now Playing screen) sounds better than Spotify's Extreme Setting (320 kbs), no arguing that.
With that said, here are the pros and cons of Tidal:
Pros:
- HIFI songs sounds amazing and Tidal is a leader (as of 10-28-14) regarding streaming Lossless/FLAC-quality music.
- The interface is easy to use (in my opinion) as users of Spotify will acclimate to the UI of Tidal fairly easily.
Cons:
- You can try Tidal free, but that is after you give Tidal your credit card number or authorize Tidal to charge you $19.99 per month after the 7 day trial (you can cancel before the 7 days are over so they will not charge you). This means if you plan to keep this app, the music will sound great, but you will be paying to play.
- Using your cell network to stream HIFI songs is disabled by default. If you enable it, I hope that you have a high enough data plan (or have an unlimited data plan) to prevent incurring data overage charges with your cellular network.
- You need a fairly fast WiFi network to stream the HIFI songs without any intermittent hiccups. I paid for the fastest service at home (Time Warner), and I still experienced intermittent buffering with some songs (around 40% - 50% of them).
- If you are streaming HIFI songs, you will experience slightly longer (up to several seconds longer) buffering regarding playing each song compared to Spotify as well if you attempt to fast forward each specific HIFI song compared to Spotify, as the HIFI songs files are larger than the Spotify Extreme Setting songs.
Findings and Suggestions
You can use your WiFi network to stream HIFI songs without your cellular data being affected if you keep the HIFI cellular streaming toggle switched off. You will need to lower quality in settings to have a compromise of not using too much data when you stream music when you are on your cellular network. Once you lower the quality, Spotify sounds just as good as Tidal, as both sound great.
You can also save the songs in offline mode, but make sure your device has enough storage space to accommodate the additional file storage space each HIFI song will require.
If you already have a subscription to Spotify Premium (or your favorite streaming service), it may be a little difficult to give up your playlists and offline songs if you decide to cancel the Spotify service for the Tidal service, and going from as low as $5 a month to $20 a month may be too big of a jump to some people. Again, regarding quality audio streaming, you currently have to pay to play.
My suggestion is that everyone should check out Tidal if you have a credit card and/or a PayPal account, because if you do not like it, you can just cancel the subscription before your trial period ends (and not get charged).
Conclusion
All and all, until more established companies like Spotify, Beats, Pandora, etcetera, up their game and offer Lossless/FLAC quality streaming, Tidal is simply put, the discerning audio enthusiasts' streaming application. Happy Listening!
