John Darko
Look up ⬆️ and let’s play a game of Spot the Difference. On the left, we see the specifics of Tidal’s Hifi tier and on the right are those of Tidal’s Hifi Plus tier. I was obliged to consult these two tables last week as my complimentary Tidal access came to an end after a solid ten-year run. Which would I go for: Hifi at €7.49/month or Hifi Plus at €13.99/month?
For context, I already pony up €10.99/month for Spotify Premium, €10.99/month for Apple Music and €7.99/month for SoundCloud Go+. Furthermore, I drop around €150/month on CDs and vinyl. When it comes to ‘supporting the artist’, my conscience is clean.
I am happy to pay for Tidal for two key reasons.
The first is Tidal Connect, which can hand off any stream to any Tidal Connect-compatible endpoint; and it does so without the troubles that plague Apple AirPlay or Google Chromecast. AirPlay streams travel through the smartphone, they aren’t always lossless and Chromecast isn’t gapless.
The second reason is Roon integration. With Roon Radio swimming out beyond the limits of my library of locally-hosted CD-rips and downloads and into Tidal’s library, I can discover hitherto unheard artists without lifting a finger. Roon’s Valence engine does all the work.
However, the real-world difference between Tidal’s CD-quality-capped Hifi tier and the hi-res-loaded ‘Max Sound Quality’ Hifi Plus tier is much weaker than the €6.50/month price differential might suggest.
Firstly, we have to ask: is our hi-fi system capable of resolving the differences between a 16bit/44.1kHz CD-quality stream and a 24bit/96kHz or 24bit/192kHz hi-res stream?
And if it is: can we hear those differences?
Before I answer those questions for myself, kindly note that the audible benefits of hi-res audio have nothing to do with the stream’s content exceeding the upper limit of human hearing and everything to do with the placement and slope of the digital filter — loudspeaker engineer Peter Comeau explains why in this Darko.Audio podcast episode.
Now comes our first gotcha.
I have an abundance of reasonably good hi-fi gear at my disposal – only snobs would say otherwise – and in the context of room acoustic differences, loudspeaker differences and amplifier differences, most of that hardware puts only a tiny sliver of daylight between albums played from Tidal in CD-quality and their hi-res counterparts, also streamed from Tidal.
It goes further: whenever a song – playing from Tidal’s Hifi Plus tier via Roon Radio – stops me in my tracks because of its sound quality, a quick jump over to Spotify confirms that it’s because the song was recorded nicely or mastered well – or both. Any track stopping (of yours truly) has never been because of hi-res audio.
This year – more than any other year – reminds us that mastering quality has more of an impact on what we hear than the music’s delivery format. To put it more succinctly: the delivery format rides side-saddle to mastering quality. And whilst we are here, so too do downsampling and dithering — the processes used to turn a hi-res studio master into a CD-quality file. Yeeehaaaww!
But we’re not done yet. Here comes our second gotcha…
Whilst more than 99% of all songs sitting on Tidal’s servers are available to stream in CD quality, a mere 6 – 8% of that same library will come down the pipe in hi-res FLAC or MQA. Tidal boasts 100 million songs in total and the release notes for its August update claim that 6 million of those are available in hi-res FLAC. The upshot is that the Hifi Plus tier adds only a smattering of hi-res audio to the extensive foundations laid by the CD-quality Hifi tier.
Re-upping on Tidal, the BIG question for me can be boiled down to the following: is it worth paying an extra €6.50/month to extract an extra couple of percent from less than 10% of a streaming library?
For me, the answer is a firm ‘no’. Tidal Hifi is by far the better value proposition.
Further information: Tidal
