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Appreciation to TIDAL

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Someone had to do this.
96kHz / 24bits digital masters? You serious?
I am currently listening to "Masters" catalogue in Tidal's desktop application which is quite a new feature.
I - am - blown - away.
At the moment I am listening to (actually re-discovering) The Division Bell by Pink Floyd. The details.. For such long years that I have missed to hear.. Just a wow..
I just am too happy and way waaay too excited to be able to reach the actual masters of so many records.
You got all of my thanks, TIDAL.
(Take this -at least- as a heads up for the audiophile community. I have no relation to TIDAL nor any other service nor any thing like that. If it is against the rules, just let me know. I can delete the post)
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MXRC
261
Apr 17, 2017
I have a love and hate relationship with TIDAL which I hope resolves itself in the near future.
I absolutely love the fact that they have lossless CD quality streaming. And, although it's still very limited, I also love their Masters collection at 96khz. Unfortunately, it's their collection of music that's been most disappointing. The more I use TIDAL, the more I discover that their library is missing a lot of music, albums, singles, b-sides etc. Apple music has this problem too. It seems like, out of all of them, only Spotify has a very very solid collection of music including foreign artists. It's my greatest hope that this issue is only a licensing problem and that TIDAL's library will soon catch up with their competitors.
The library of music is only one of its flaws. It also fails in their radio playlists and recommendations. Their library organization and the algorithm they're using to pull the tracks together into a radio playlist or a recommendation is not that accurate in terms of similarity to your reference track. Spotify does this well. And, as much as I love hip-hop, TIDAL has a problem with being one dimensional where everything on dashboard tends to be hip-hop / RnB centered with very few other genres or artists featured. The UI has issues too, but there are too many to get into that.
All things considered, I'm still battling with whether or not to cancel my $20 subscription with TIDAL. After spending about 8 years listening to only compressed music once the internet took over, its a friggin' delight to hear things in lossless format. Ugh... I don't know. I always tell myself I'll cancel it at the end of the month, but I never do. The audio is sooooo good.
Turkay
363
Apr 18, 2017
MXRCI totally get you because I sometimes feel the same way as you do. It is not perfect (nor near perfect by any means) but such a great service to get the best audio quality out of our smart devices especially on the go.I think it is still the cheapest way to access that level of audio quality within the competition. Buying FLACs still costs way much more.
Inscrutable
4
Feb 17, 2017
Hmmm ... I thought Tidal streamed only up to CD quality (16/44.1) ... guess I will have to take another look at them. Got a Pono player to listen to Hi-rez, but their site/store/software is a dysfuncitonal mess right now - and they dont even put the fun in dysfunctional
boMD
162
Jan 15, 2017
Loving the new MQA streaming. And looking forward to Audioquest's upcoming update to the Dragonfly Black and Red. Will be interesting to hear the passthrough decoding at the full 24bit/192kHz files.
For anyone not sure what MQA is, or how it works, there is a great breakdown over at http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2017/01/mqa-tidal-where-are-we-now/
I'm too intimidated to pay $20 a month to a service where I would lose all my playlists, play count, favorites, and basically start over if ever I stopped paying the fee for a month or two, BUT access to masters is Very commendable, and perhaps only feasible to distribute over the Internet. It's something id like to join.
boMD
162
Jan 15, 2017
Turkay
363
Jan 15, 2017
boMDBTW I haven't tried that service yet but it's so nice to have something like that. Who knows, maybe another streaming service will do things better in the future.
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