five years ago, technically, and financially, it didn’t make sense to stream DSD. Now, since we can stream 4k video, it does make sense. I wonder if anyone will see it that way. If so, they and DSD can take off, IMHO.
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I pay $5 USD per month for TIDAL HiFi through the Third Man Records Vault Subscription Service deal, and even at this low price I am thinking of dropping TIDAL due to the lossy MQA situation.
I wouldn’t want Tidal, even if it were free.
5 years ago DSD was all the rage and people were buying DSD players, me included. I sold it after a month. Qobuz actually announced a DSD steaming date, I think it was March 2016 to start in October 2016, and it never happened.
It’s not due to the ability to stream the file sizes.
There are only a few thousand titles available in DSD, around 1% of those at CD quality and probably less than 10% of those at HD PCM. Plus DSD is at least 4 formats - 64/128/256/512. Qobuz stream the highest HD PCM format, but you could not do that with DSD as many players cannot handle 256 or 512 DSD.
Add to that the labels that do prioritise DSD certainly would make far more money from direct downloads than streaming royalties.
Lavorgna and Darko are perfectly happy with 16/44 and so am I. @aangen may see the benefits of PCM HD, but his ultra system has single cables more expensive than many peoples entire systems.
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There is evidence that this new tier is actually the MQA without the ability to unfold it in software. This would mean the “MQA bits” will be processed as noise by S/D DAC. Maybe an MQA capable DAC can still do the first unfold. A software decoder will simply pass the MQA to the DAC as PCM and those “robbed” bits come out as noise.
I’ve subscribed to both for about a year and a half, and I too was just about to jettison Tidal. While most of the time both services have the music I’m looking for, when one or the other doesn’t, it’s almost always Tidal that’s missing it. And even with full MQA unfolding, I don’t hear a noticeable difference between that and Qobuz’s hi-res streams. If anything, I think maybe Qobuz is a tiny bit cleaner sounding to my ear.
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The treacherous path (a quote from the fellow who submitted the question to Paul).
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The experiment has started. I just disabled Tidal in Roon.
After playing Joni Mitchell’s Hejira (a local 192/24), the Radio kicked in with Dylan’s “Isis”. So far so good.
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The last count I had, neglecting download only albums, was 6200 titles, Although that was several years ago, I’m sure that it can’t be much more than 7000 including downloads. Can it??
Qobuz is always cleaner and closer to the original to my ears.
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Yeah, I’ve been hearing rumors about that. I can guarantee you one thing: Apple will market a bump to lossless as “revolutionary.”
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I’ll sign up for Amazon before Apple.
And I’m never signing up for Amazon. Nope.
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Even if either started streaming genuine, real deal DSD?
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We’re not either companies target audience so not going to happen any time in the near future. Will be surprised it Spotify actually goes through with their proposed upgrade as they are doing fine without our small customer base.
Well, this came out 2 weeks ago…
Even if they include free pizza for life. I do not like those two companies at all.
I should mention I just a minute ago ordered $320 worth of nonsense from Amazon using my iPad to place the order. Drat.
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Because it supplies the original FLAC files.
One reason Qobuz eschewed MQA is because about half their revenues came from purchased downloads, and they were only interested in selling the master FLAC files mainly via their Sublime+ Subscription, which discounts HD prices to CD prices.
At the end of the day, it remains that format choices are based on how artists and distributors can make money. Usually more than one format. So an indie band might release on Bandcamp with a fixed run of vinyl, independent jazz is often released on CD only, quality labels like ECM know that many of their customers will stream and buy a download, and larger classical and jazz independents like Linn and Hyperion will remain download and CD with no streaming because of the exceptional quality of their artists and many customers that will buy it.
Otherwise, lossless streaming is coalescing at 16/44 PCM with a bit of HD PCM, unsurprising given there are no bandwidth issues and neither recording studios nor listeners have to invest in new hardware.
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" first there was the wheel, then came Apple Lossless, and the world became a better place! " and, of course this is over a cover of “oh, Happy Days”, the 1969 Edwin Hawkins Singers song.
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The differences between HIFI Plus and Master are the additional 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos Music. If anyone knows what is the benefit of these two types? I never use Tidal MQA since the converted Tidal MQA tracks sound the same as the converted Tidal HIFI tracks. I use AudKit Tidizer to convert both Tidal MQA and Tidal HIFI to FLAC files. That is no need to pay extra money for the same thing.
Would you mind elaborating a bit?
I don’t understand what you are doing or why, specifically.
Are you converting files that you purchase from Tidal to FLAC or are you doing some sort of conversion to the files streamed from their database?
TIA/Cheers.