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On mid-fi do you hear much difference between Tidal and Spotify

If you are using Spotify paid membership and using the 320kbps vs Tidal streaming? I am mostly listening (wired) in my car and headphone with my iPhone and MacBook.

Since the services are very similar I wondered if it is worth the $20 for Tidal HiFi vs $10 for Spotify. Or similarly Tidal Premium at 320kbps at $10.

Thoughts?
portlandlay
jyprez's avatar
jyprez
241 posts
 

I have subscriptions to Pandora, Spotify and Tidal HIFI. Tidal (HIFI only)  is WAY better in sound quality than the other two, no contest. I have the others because, Pandora has  a better random selection of music when I just want to listen to background jazz in a particular style through my Sonos player, Spotify was what my kids said I should get (it has the best selection of stuff the young set wants) and it does give a better selection of exercise music for the gym but the sound quality sucks (kids don't care).

chrisr's avatar
chrisr
541 posts
 
I have never heard tidal, but spotify is ok on earbuds/cellphone, can be ok on a stereo but it depends on the time of day in my experience;. I have a membership and sometimes, usually friday evenings and saturdays, i have to switch to pandora because spotify streams at 64kbps or less.  It is very rare when it sounds actually decent.

glennewdick's avatar
glennewdick
1,500 posts
 
I do not think you need google chrome to get the full bandwidth for tidal I’ve been running the tidal app on my PC and getting the highest rates available for the specific tracks i can tell as my DAC switches with the rate (even tried the MQA with a loner dac to good effect). that said i can not say how it works on apple devices so sorry if i’m out of line or miss informed.
portlandlay OP
62 posts
 
Thanks Glennewdick, I have no way to measure the it but the app does say HIFI/MASTER when it is playing.  So I presume it is as good as I will get.
ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
4,279 posts
 
@glennewdick
"I do not think you need google chrome to get the full bandwidth for tidal ...."

I'm merely reporting what pops up on my MacBook when I use Safari to log into my Tidal subscription account and click on HiFi in the lower right.  HiFi is grayed out but a pop up window opens with 3 streaming choices:  Normal, Hi, & HiFi/Master.  HiFi/Master is grayed out with a message below it:  "HiFi playback is only available in Google Chrome."  Yeah, maybe this is something only encountered with an Apple product.  It was simple to work around by using Google Chrome to access Tidal.      
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