Comment by meowface

I tried Tidal nearly a decade ago, and the audible fluttering effect caused by their audio watermarking totally ruined certain types of music, like choral recordings, strings and such. It was obviously apparent on $20 ear buds driven by any device, far beyond the more stereotypical audiophile gripes.

I opened a support ticket but they never responded. After that it was difficult to take their lossless claims seriously when the labels were providing such garbage source material. Their whole value prop was totally hollowed out.

I don't know whether the labels still impose such horrible practices, but I largely gave up on streaming services after that experience and now focus on keeping good digital archives of my physical library.

I'm pretty strongly in the camp of trust the science and measurements for audio stuff. Thus I suspect its mostly just better sounding masters, but I was shocked at how much I noticed the sound quality of Tidal compared to Spotify when I switched.

It's also sort of an inverted “Van Halen demanding a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed” thing for me, too. The vast majority of my Tidal listening happens over Bluetooth, so that 24bit/192kHz FLAC stream is just gonna get downsampled to 16bit/48kHz anyway because that's all any Bluetooth speaker or headset is capable of doing — but the fact that it's an option in the first place signals that other things are being done right, too (namely: that Tidal's whole “we're the streaming service that pays artists the most per listen” premise actually has some semblance of merit rather than being complete marketing bullshit; while recording quality ain't the strongest signal possible for that, it's certainly a good sign when musicians/publishers are willing to send over the highest-bitrate lossless recordings they've got and not just the same ol' compressed-to-shit MPEG audio you can yank off YouTube for free).

The original recording of almost all music on Tidal was done with equipment that was very, very far from the 192kHz "fidelity" it claims.