Tidal vs Spotify and is there really a difference?

[Tigerleon]

So I've decided to take a "free" 30-day+30-day trial of Tidal's HiFi+ because of @Stahlmann's thread about paying for AM, Tidal, or any other streaming service and see if the difference between FLAC and Spotify premium's OGG Vorbis 320 kbit/s files can be perceived.

 

So far after a couple of hours of listening, I haven't heard any bigger difference than around 1-5% in terms of fullness and quality to any song at any quality higher than Vorbis. It could also be placebo which I don't know until I am proven wrong. For example, FLAC at 16bit 44khz and 24bit 44khz feels like it has a tiny tiny difference in quality if there even is an audible quality increase. The same goes for FLAC to the max MQA stuff with the 24bit 192khz sample rate that I haven't figured out what to use for it to be fully utilized in my DAC's software settings.

 

There are so many different settings that I don't know even make a difference when I use them or not. For example if I should leave the sample rate at 44khz, 48khz, or even 192khz for all songs or not. Then there is the passthrough MQA setting which I don't know if it should be on or off because my DAC isn't MQA supported and the exclusive mode, on or off? If anyone could explain these to me and what I should use would be great.

 

I know Tidal pays a good royalty to the artists but is it worth the price?

[ImWilly]

For me it depends on your audio gears as well as mastering and recording process from the artist studio

If you have great quality audio gears, good room with sound isolation, and listening to the song that is made by professional, then there will be a difference listening in AAC compared to lossless digital audio quality

 

In the end, they are still digitally distributed instead of analog such as gramophone, so there will be no end of rabbit hole comparing the audio quality

And if the recording and mastering production is sub par, it doesn't matter how expensive your audio gears are, "Trash in, Trash out"

28 minutes ago, Tigerleon said:

For example if I should leave the sample rate at 44khz, 48khz, or even 192khz for all songs or not

Most studio records at sampling rate 48kHz, only a handful extremely high end studio that records at 192kHz. This may seem silly because our home PC is "capable" of reproduce sound output at "192kHz". Studio has to also a lot of audio source channel (most of the time they records more than 32 channels), then it rendered into 2 stereo channel for us as end users.

Some "audiophile" would say they feel the difference of sampling rate, but as their claim of "burn in" time for headphone has been debunked, higher sampling rate than studio production is also a made up myth by them

[Thaldor]

If you're questioning the quality difference, do as I have outlined in the Stahlmann's thread: Internally (with software within your PC so none of your audio equipment matter) record the exactly same song from both services at your chosen qualities, import them to a DAW like Reaper or whatever as long as it can do phase reversal, make sure both tracks start at exactly same time and play exactly the same (zoom in to first sound wave or find some easy to align peak and match both tracks to that), reverse the phase of one track and play both tracks at the same time. The phase reverse will negate the sounds from the normal track and what you have left is the difference between the tracks.

 

Just to make it clear: None of your audio equipment matter before the last step of listening the outcome. If you need to crank your volume up a lot to hear the outcome, well, the difference between the tracks is so minimal it basicly doesn't matter at the listening levels you would normally use.

If you need to boost your volume to hear anything, that is the same as running the audio into oscilloscope and zooming into singular sound wave and comparing the differences of 0.000..0001V region where you will find differences from anything and everything.

It is also the isolated difference, so there's nothign else than the difference so if you hear a small hiss, hearing that hiss through the track is probably pretty damn impossible.

[VoidX]

I once made a blind test tool that gives you different encodings in real-time called Nuance which you can download from here. Spotify has 256 kbps Opus, it's marked on your end result as a progress bar. I have asked an audio forum to send me their results, and this percentage of the 90 people could pass the following formats:

 

Nobody was able to reach Spotify's compression, not even self-proclaimed audiophiles on a $300k system. We can easily call Spotify scientifically transparent.

[Tigerleon]

10 hours ago, ImWilly said:

For me it depends on your audio gears as well as mastering and recording process from the artist studio

If you have great quality audio gears, good room with sound isolation, and listening to the song that is made by professional, then there will be a difference listening in AAC compared to lossless digital audio quality

 

In the end, they are still digitally distributed instead of analog such as gramophone, so there will be no end of rabbit hole comparing the audio quality

And if the recording and mastering production is sub par, it doesn't matter how expensive your audio gears are, "Trash in, Trash out"

Most studio records at sampling rate 48kHz, only a handful extremely high end studio that records at 192kHz. This may seem silly because our home PC is "capable" of reproduce sound output at "192kHz". Studio has to also a lot of audio source channel (most of the time they records more than 32 channels), then it rendered into 2 stereo channel for us as end users.

Some "audiophile" would say they feel the difference of sampling rate, but as their claim of "burn in" time for headphone has been debunked, higher sampling rate than studio production is also a made up myth by them

Thanks for the info.

 

I have some unanswered questions. How does MQA passthrough work? Should I leave it on or off if my DAC doesn't support MQA? The other question is how the exclusive mode works. Does it work with EQ and other DSP or do I need to turn my soundcard's DSP off by using "direct mode" for it to work? For some reason, using exclusive mode with my normal EQ settings on, and everything it sounds echoey or kind of unstable or as if the volume is going up and down depending on the quantity of bass or treble played in the song It doesn't sound distorted just different. Not too sure if that is caused by not using direct mode with my DAC or not.

 

Edit: When it comes to windows sampling. Is the sample rate of my DAC better to have higher or lower than the source being played?

[Thaldor]

9 minutes ago, Tigerleon said:

Thanks for the info.

 

I have some unanswered questions. How does MQA passthrough work? Should I leave it on or off if my DAC doesn't support MQA? The other question is how the exclusive mode works. Does it work with EQ and other DSP or do I need to turn my soundcard's DSP off by using "direct mode" for it to work? For some reason, using exclusive mode with my normal EQ settings on, and everything it sounds echoey or kind of unstable or as if the volume is going up and down depending on the quantity of bass or treble played in the song It doesn't sound distorted just different. Not too sure if that is caused by not using direct mode with my DAC or not.

Fast search and the MQA seems to require DAC that supports it, otherwise you get "inferior" samplerate. Blablabla... Something about folding the samples and the unfolding them to get higher samplerate out of lower samplerate, blablabla... Up to 192kHz... Yeah, horseshit.

Let me put it this way. Pretty much only place where you could find an audio studio constantly using over 48kHz samplerate and over 16-bit bitdepth will be something like movie sound effect studio where they need to do a lot of processing to the samples and they have carte blanche to do whatever. Smaller studios pretty much only work with 16-bit 44.1/48kHz because the equipment is a lot cheaper, professionals move just to the 24-bit but still a lot of it is done with 16-bit because easier to handle, cheaper (we talk easily in 10-100's of thousands) and the difference in the end result is like fart in Sahara, especially when you consider that people who think they can hear the difference with their audio gear and who would burn their pants if it wasn't what they think it is are like 0.something% of the audience. There can be something like Sony flagship studios and whatever that have all the bells and whistles and deal with million dollar mixer tables just so that they can handle the 192kHz 128-bit audio, but it's in the name, "flagship studio", their main objective is to look good while some extreme big name artist is there seemingly recording a song (that they never ever recorded in their home studio) and investors and press can be amazed. Also also, that "flagship" studio probably deals heavily with analog audio because reasons.

 

But MQA is apparently completely DAC thing and if it really is that your computers soundcard EQs shouldn't affect it, unless it's even more horseshit and there's audio on your PC that it's EQ can affect and then the whole "authentication" process of the MQA is, well, your PC just applied EQ to the track before it was decoded by "authenticated" hardware.

 

Is it good, is it bad? If you think putting paperbag on your head and hiding under the pub table from the Earth destroying meteorite makes a difference and makes you feel good, who am I to judge you and your opinion?

[ImWilly]

39 minutes ago, Tigerleon said:

How does MQA

I can't really vouch for MQA decoder/encoder works, since my personal audio is only combo DAC & amplifier and headphone

In my personal preference, I rarely use audio visualization feature

Most of the plugin / audio accessories is only when recording process

Even simple EQ (Equalizer), I only use for microphone to adjust recorded vocal tone, but not on the headphone (output)

 

[Tigerleon]

20 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

Fast search and the MQA seems to require DAC that supports it, otherwise you get "inferior" samplerate. Blablabla... Something about folding the samples and the unfolding them to get higher samplerate out of lower samplerate, blablabla... Up to 192kHz... Yeah, horseshit.

That's what I read up on as well haha. Sounds like total horseshit.

[Tigerleon]

24 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

Is it good, is it bad? If you think putting paperbag on your head and hiding under the pub table from the Earth destroying meteorite makes a difference and makes you feel good, who am I to judge you and your opinion?

I've been using Spotify Premium as my only music player and going over to Tidal now made me realize the quality isn't perceivable with trying back and forth when it comes to Spotify Premium and Tidal's quality settings which are AAC 320 kbit/s, FLACs, and MQA stuff. I also just wanted to know people's opinions on the matter. Also MQA seems like total BS when it comes to their claims.

[Thaldor]

15 minutes ago, Tigerleon said:

That's what I read up on as well haha. Sounds like total horseshit.

And then there's this:

I already called horseshit on the specs and method, it's good to know that audiophile snake oil is still complete horseshit especially when someone throws some actual testing into it. There was also just recently Techmoan video about MQA-CD's and the outtake was pretty much "they seem to be just louder" (the classic "higher-quality audio" trick, just make it louder).

[Cocococo]

24 minutes ago, Tigerleon said:

I've been using Spotify Premium as my only music player and going over to Tidal now made me realize the quality isn't perceivable with trying back and forth when it comes to Spotify Premium and Tidal's quality settings which are AAC 320 kbit/s, FLACs, and MQA stuff. I also just wanted to know people's opinions on the matter. Also MQA seems like total BS when it comes to their claims.

Yeah whenever i've tried using Tidal and other "higher" quality streaming services i can't tell which i'm listening to after a few songs in a playlist, given how atrocious Tidal is to use and how buggy it is (people can lose playlists with thousands of songs at basically random) i just go back to spotify because it's easy, i do have CD ripped FLAC's that feel like they are higher quality (could also just be placebo tbf) and honestly when i want to support artists going to a live concert, buying a shirt etc support so much better than the best paying subscriptions ever will (think of it like supporting a YT channel, even their lowest priced merch is still worth more than you watching every ad on every video of their channel for a year) 

[cmndr]

The mastering of a title matters. 
If one service or another has a better source, then it "wins" 
If you're talking about bitrate differences... not much, barely at all. 

 

20 hours ago, ImWilly said:

In the end, they are still digitally distributed instead of analog such as gramophone, so there will be no end of rabbit hole comparing the audio quality

And if the recording and mastering production is sub par, it doesn't matter how expensive your audio gears are, "Trash in, Trash out"

Most studio records at sampling rate 48kHz, only a handful extremely high end studio that records at 192kHz. This may seem silly because our home PC is "capable" of reproduce sound output at "192kHz". Studio has to also a lot of audio source channel (most of the time they records more than 32 channels), then it rendered into 2 stereo channel for us as end users.

Some "audiophile" would say they feel the difference of sampling rate, but as their claim of "burn in" time for headphone has been debunked, higher sampling rate than studio production is also a made up myth by them

 

 

Roughly 0% of people can hear past 20KHz. 
Most teenagers can't hear much past 16-18KHz
You can guarantee perfect reproduction of a signal up to 20KHz signal with 40KHz plus some overhead (so 44 or 48) to account for roll off (producers literally 0 out sound at very high frequencies). 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem

The math was solved decades ago. For a 1 second clip of sound if you split it into 48,000 even slices, draw dots on each of them and then throw a bit of math at it, you can get a perfect reproduction up to ~20KHz. 
This is still kind of a brute force approach (save 48k points per second) and there's a lot of algorithms out there to make it more efficient, usually at the loss of very high frequency sounds. 

It's a similar story for bit depth. The dynamic range of 16 bit music is pretty darn high. Having overkill mainly matters if you're mixing/mastering content and are worried about data quality after MANY edits. 

[Psittac]

There is a very small difference between the two, but that's not why I use Tidal, I use it because they give the highest percentage per song played to the creators.  If there is a perceivable difference it is so small that most wouldn't be able to tell.  I know that I haven't A/B tested it and something like removing the noise from my fishtank would make a bigger impact than going to FLAC.  Also I don't pay for the highest tier, again it's just a philosophy that sold me on the service.

[Stahlmann]

Even Crinacle, one of the stingiest audio reviewers, said in their AKG N400 TWS review that lossy audio doesn't matter as long as it still sounds good. (referring to the useage of a lossy Bluetooth format, which is a no-go for many audiophiles) I feel like many audiophiles fall into the hole where they overanalyse music and technicality to a point where they can't "just enjoy it" anymore. It's similar to people who just completed their PC build and get stuck benchmarking and hunting for bottlenecks instead of just enjoying games, which was the entire point of building the PC in the first place.

[rice guru]

I'm a bit late to this thread. I've run blind tests  for myself. Using my liquid spark DAC and Asgard 3 off my PC as a source and a friend to run it for me and note down we both agreed to use his pair of HD 800s. We ran 20 songs we were very familiar with and did 3 runs. Going into this I already knew I wasn't super sensitive to this already but wanted to do a more comprehensive test than before I was correct 8 out the 20 times on our first run , 11 out of 20 time on our second time, and 7 out of 20 time on my third run. My friend who definitely has better hearing than me (he's younger and both have gotten our ears tested fairly recently) barely did better. He got 10 out of right first run , 12 second run and 10 again third run. This was of course using Spotify premium and Tidal all music used was downloaded and settings were set to highest possible quality. We were both consistently guessing the majority of songs correctly when at the lowest quality settings for Spotify vs flac on tidal though. I will admit this testing method was probably flawed and I could have used my more expensive DAC but I wanted the sound to be as neutral as possible for the setup that I had regardless I think was good enough for me to come to the conclusion the Spotify premium is good enough for me.

 

Edited February 14 by rice guru
Edit: wrote this very tired and made the mistake of calling our testing double blind. It was not in fact double blind the tester knew what he was selecting we could not really figure out a proper way to test it double blind

[Tigerleon]

28 minutes ago, rice guru said:

I'm a bit late to this thread. I've run double blind tests  for myself. Using my liquid spark DAC and Asgard 3 off my PC as a source and a friend to run it for me and note down we both agreed to use his pair of HD 800s. We ran 20 songs we were very familiar with and did 3 runs. Going into this I already knew I wasn't super sensitive to this already but wanted to do a more comprehensive test than before I was correct 8 out the 20 times on our first run , 11 out of 20 time on our second time, and 7 out of 20 time on my third run. My friend who definitely has better hearing than me (he's younger and both have gotten our ears tested fairly recently) barely did better. He got 10 out of right first run , 12 second run and 10 again third run. This was of course using Spotify premium and Tidal all music used was downloaded and settings were set to highest possible quality. We were both consistently guessing the majority of songs correctly when at the lowest quality settings for Spotify vs flac on tidal though. I will admit this testing method was probably flawed and I could have used my more expensive DAC but I wanted the sound to be as neutral as possible for the setup that I had regardless I think was good enough for me to come to the conclusion the Spotify premium is good enough for me.

 

That says it all. Even when you used a good setup and you were unable to distinguish the difference then there is no point. There is a limit to devices and files and it doesn't matter how much you spend after a certain point. If someone says otherwise. Hello alien with 100x better hearing.

[rice guru]

50 minutes ago, Tigerleon said:

That says it all. Even when you used a good setup and you were unable to distinguish the difference then there is no point. There is a limit to devices and files and it doesn't matter how much you spend after a certain point. If someone says otherwise. Hello alien with 100x better hearing.

I made a edit to my comment I called it double blind originally. That was a mistake. 

[Tigerleon]

2 minutes ago, rice guru said:

I made a edit to my comment I called it double blind originally. That was a mistake. 

Didn't even notice hah.

[Psittac]

On 2/14/2024 at 3:57 AM, Stahlmann said:

Even Crinacle, one of the stingiest audio reviewers, said in their AKG N400 TWS review that lossy audio doesn't matter as long as it still sounds good. (referring to the useage of a lossy Bluetooth format, which is a no-go for many audiophiles) I feel like many audiophiles fall into the hole where they overanalyse music and technicality to a point where they can't "just enjoy it" anymore. It's similar to people who just completed their PC build and get stuck benchmarking and hunting for bottlenecks instead of just enjoying games, which was the entire point of building the PC in the first place.

I agree to people not being able to just enjoy what they have.  I mean there is something to be said about overclocking as it's own purpose for a computer and analyzing music to be it's own sub-genre, but as I'm getting older I find thing's like that being to obsessive.  Back 20 years ago I was overclocking my Athlon XP-m far far beyond anyone else, but I wasn't in a good place mentally.  If I had spent day and night for years (literally, went to bed with stress test's running) and didn't dunk on everyone it would have been a problem.

 

When it comes to audio, I've had my far share of abuse to my ears not to mention just getting older.  I've made a hobby out of it but rather than going for the purest sound, rather I have purchased several cheaper solutions just so that I can get experience while enjoying thing's that are drastically different.  Also I went on a small budget kick so I had real world experience so that I can give first hand experience when recommending products.  I will say that my most enjoyable headphones are in fact my most expensive ones but part of that is comfort.  There is certainly more to be had with money, don't get me wrong, but I could be happy with just two or three headphones, a schiit stack and a tube amp.  But if I hadn't experienced ~30 headphones I wouldn't know which ones to narrow down to.

[rice guru]

On 2/15/2024 at 4:24 PM, Psittac said:

I will say that my most enjoyable headphones are in fact my most expensive ones but part of that is comfort

I feel this so hard. Currently my daily driver is my pair of audio quest nighthawk carbons a notoriously flawed sounding pair of headphones. But I use it daily anyway regardless of flaws bauces it's original price was able to afford it the ability of being super damn comfortable. It also helps this is such a unique sounding headphone aiming for that speaker in an over dampened room sound which is super relaxing and refreshing vs my beyers who like to shout detail at me. 

[Thaldor]

I have to say now that I have taken free deep dive into the premium quality Tidal, that there is a difference.

 

They have some very bad mixes.

 

That can be also my taste in music but, seriously, holy fucking shit where the fuck they have gained so flat mixes that I have heard more dynamic planks in hardware stores?

I had to go through and I even disabled any post-software EQ's and all that to find out was it just something in my signal chain that makes Tool sound like wooden hammer with as much balls as castrated cat and Deep Purple sounded like someone recorded them from C-tapes, even my self ripped LP rips from my fathers collection somewhere around 90's to early 00's with garbage level mp3 had more dynamic range than Tidals whatever mix they found from the Goodwill. And I don't even want to talk more about Rainbow... Stargazer's into snare is dead on Tidal mix... And I have some really high quality rips and some absolute garbage rips from the Rising album but none managed to turn "tshhhh" into "tsk" (even the Deluxe Edition both mixes lack the lower spectrum compared to the SHM-CD from which the "New York Mix" should be from, those are way better mixes than the non-Deluxe ones on Tidal but I have no idea where they got that bad mixes).

 

And I am not talking about something that would come from fileformats or bitrates (while those can affect but not this much). The low level rumble is just gone especially from Tool, in Jambi it's like Tidal mix was afraid to break something by really driving that bass and before someone says I have higher quality rips from my CDs and CDs have higher quality audio, no, Tidal should have "superior dynamics" because 24-bit and 96kHz compared to my 16-bit 44.1kHz FLACs but no, stuff like the Schism's 1:20 bridge is just not there and 2:00 mark sounds like someone booked Tool to play in a fucking school disco because the soundstage sounds that small.

 

I wasn't sure was I fucked up or just added some EQ to my rips and started to strictly compare Tidal to Spotify (without any EQ) and there was the same thing, Tidal mixes were flat. Spotify mixes were as far as I can tell identical to my rips.

 

Also how fucking stupid must someone be to fall for the "Max/MQA" garbage? They don't even fucking hide it that it's just some mumbo jumbo garbage, they literally say directly "Max/MQA up to 24-bit 192kHz", just to make it even clearer:
"UP TO"

No, they aren't saying the "Max/MQA" quality is something superior from "Max/FLAC" or whatever High or anything. It's just probably up to somewhere there or not even close to but fuck they tell you. Same garbage scamming as I would sell my car as "You know Toyota Yaris can go over 300km/h on dirt roads?" and in reality, yes, Toyota GR Yaris (Rally2) tuned and made for WRC can fucking rip the dirt road, but my Toyota Yaris 1.0L can hardly get to 150km/h downhill on highway, but hey "Toyota can go over 300km/h", I am not wrong but I am misleading you like a pig to the slaughter house.

They're not afraid to tell the bitdepths and sample rates for FLAC recordings but MQA and you get basicly no information unless you rip the songs and look at it by yourself at which point they would probably pull the normal audiophile scamming argument "it's not our system, it's yours" even if you had airtight proof that it's non-altered file from their servers.

 

And when it comes to audiophile stuff. Always remember that most of the Beatles albums were rough mixed with the Beatles in studio that only operated in mono and everytime you hear stereo mix of the Beatles, it's completely mixed by some audio technician as "extra mile" without the Beatles giving two fucks about it. Back then and earlier stereo systems were so rare that pretty much no one had them and what little stereo mixes were done were mostly just to market that the studio can do it, not that the music sounded any better, just that the studio had the capability to do it. That's an example what goes in the other side, unless you have insider knowledge, you will have pretty much zero idea how the thing was supposed to sound and the best you can do is to listen it however you think it sounds the best. So, go crazy and experiment, add bass, twist the V, play with the reverb and remember that there's a reason why it's "studio monitors" and "high-end HiFi" separately.

[rice guru]

On 2/18/2024 at 4:21 PM, Thaldor said:

Also how fucking stupid must someone be to fall for the "Max/MQA" garbage?

Their original intentions behind this i think had a lot of people fooled. But yeah they had a lot of people really buying into it. I saw so many people in various audio groups defending the shit out of it.but mostly cause they were invested cause they had equipment that supported the format.