Tidal Lossless Music Streaming Review: Forget Spotify, Get CD Quality Music
I remember when Spotify launched, it was something of a life-changing experience. For so long, the music industry had fought and fought to maintain the status quo of music. Pushing us to buy CDs when we only liked one track on the album, and forcing CD singles on us, to waste plastic and shipping costs. Then along came Spotify, which wasn’t the first of its kind, but was certainly one of the best sounding, and most comprehensive in terms of library.
But from today, there’s a brand-new service that is launching in both the US and UK. Its main claim is that while Spotify offers 320kbps music, it will offer CD quality streaming using the “Free Lossless Audio Codec” or FLAC – ALAC (Apple AAPL +0.76% Lossless Audio Codec) is used on iPhone and other iOS devices. The specs say that you’ll get the full CD sampling rate of 44 kHz, 16bit and at a bitrate of 1411kbps.
Tidal on PC – image: Tidal
Ahead of its launch, I got access to the service to give it a test. As I did so, music was still being added to the library, and indeed the company warns that will remain the case for the next week or so. But to my surprise, there was no shortage of the music I wanted to hear. Tidal says it has 25 million tracks available, and there was very little I couldn’t find that I regularly listened with my Google GOOGL -0.11% Play Music subscription.
Of course the main selling point for Tidal over anything else is the quality. And on that front I have to say that I was totally blown away. I tried several different phones and a PC for my testing. My day-to-day phone is still the Note 3, so I used that for my first test. On this device, Tidal is let down somewhat by the very average DAC in the Samsung, so it’s only a little better than my Google Play Music subscription. I then switched to the LG G3, which has a better DAC, and almost always sounds loads better than the Note. I was impressed here, and I added my high-end Denon headphones too, which gave me a truly lovely sound. The G3 is a good choice for a service like Tidal, as it can support even higher bitrates than used here, and makes a point of doing so well.
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