Keep using tidal hifi or switch to Google play music?

CBojorges · August 27, 2016

Hi guys.

YouTube red has arrived to my country (Mexico) and it has a very good value for the price (about 5 usd per month).

Right now I'm on the free trial and while I was on the buss listening to music I started hearing like the sound was cracking. It sounded like if I was listening to a really low quality mp3 so I wondered what was the bitrate. What I found out was that you can't select the bitrate with play music so only God knows what's the default.

I made a quick search on google and reddit says it's 192 for downloaded music and 320 for streaming (idkw). I couldn't find any official info.

Thats when I remembered once I switched to tidal not hifi because I knew the next month I wasn't gonna be receiving any money so u needed to save some money. That month came and I forgot about that switch and was listening to some music with my sennheiser's hdr 175 while cleaning my apartment and suddenly I felt music didn't sound as nice as it used to. At first I thought I damaged my headphones and then I remembered I wasn't steaming on hifi. That's when I thought cd quality really mattered.

Anyway, TLDR ; should I stay with tidal hifi or switch to play music? Was it all a placebo effect?

Some extra information: for the bus I use bose soudlink 2 (so Bluetooth) and with the computer I use sure srh 840

iShad · August 28, 2016

Google Play should streams at 320kbps if you select the highest setting. This just comes down to flac vs 320kbps; if you can hear the difference and don't mind paying the price for tidal then just stick with that. Regarding if it was placebo or not, I too could hear the difference when I tried their A/B test. I swear they intentionally make the premium version sounds worst so people would subscribe to hifi. Personally, I've converted my flac collection to 320kbps to use with my th900 and 64 A12 for my own A/B test and both were identical.

CBojorges · August 28, 2016

3 hours ago, iShad said:

Google Play should streams at 320kbps if you select the highest setting. This just comes down to flac vs 320kbps; if you can hear the difference and don't mind paying the price for tidal then just stick with that. Regarding if it was placebo or not, I too could hear the difference when I tried their A/B test. I swear they intentionally make the premium version sounds worst so people would subscribe to hifi. Personally, I've converted my flac collection to 320kbps to use with my th900 and 64 A12 for my own A/B test and both were identical.

The streaming quality is 320 kbps but I mainly listen to downloaded files and there is no explicit bitrate mentioned about the downloaded files. I do belive it's possible it downloads files in 192 kbps since the downloaded files are too small.

Here's an article about that http://www.marcurselli.com/2014/03/03/the-truth-about-music-streaming-services-and-the-ultimate-audio-quality-shootout-test-beats-vs-mog-vs-play-music-by-google-vs-rdio-vs-spotify/

Also once I tried to do an independent A/B test with spotify vs tidal and I could just listen to some differences with some particular songs while paying a lot of attention so i concluded that I was just being picky.

Thanks for your opinion.