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Tidal vs spotify vs apple music reddit12/25/2023 ![]() ![]() If you play tidal on your pc and connect an external DAC to headphones/speakers, but tolerating very loud sound is not the same as being able to hear it properly.) (The exception there is the ear's ability to tolerate very loud sounds by engaging muscles to protect the tiny bones in the inner ear that are damaged by loud sounds that 'sliding scale' allows the ear to tolerate a wider dynamic range than the 90+ dB offered by the CD. science-types will probably rush to explain that the reason folks couldn't seem to differentiate is because human hearing pretty much falls within the limits of the CD format. And the double blind testing publicly available seems to suggest that even experienced listeners with high end gear don't seem to be able to differentiate it from hi res lossless. it DOES reduce required data bandwidth vis a vis actual lossless versions of the same files. We could probably argue about whether it's actually a 'digital rights management' strategy or merely an attempt to ingratiate a money-mine proprietary 'standard' into the recording production world.īut there's little question that a lot of musicians, production personnel, and high end gear makers are quite wary of its proprietary aspects. MQA is certainly proprietary - they charge content producers and equipment makers for licensing - and it's certainly a lossy codec. (helped me determine wireless and wired carplay were both 16/44 so no point going wired just for better quality) You'll need to find at least one or two 24bit/192khz tracks just to test, but when playing and setting different outputs (dac/airplay/internal/carplay/etc) iAudioGate's player shows the rates being used and the DAC name which is pretty handy. It was made for high res flac files (came out before tidal). One way to confirm what resolution your output is playing at, buy the app iAudioGate. ![]() So the 16/44 output from a MQA file is what was intended by masters to be heard at 16/44, whereas downsampling any high resolution music from Apple, you're getting what the software feels like not throwing out. The benefit of MQA in that scenario is MQA is inherently designed to compress multiple different resolution levels. I have an Apple one family account and so I am now looking at how to save some money there.ĪirPlay itself caps out at 16bit/44.1khz, you're not getting high quality out of either as any high resolution tracks are being downsampled. I only tried Tidal on a trial basis to scratch an itch that I was sure would prove Apple to be its equivalent or better. I keep thinking I am missing something, but Apple has really disappointed me in this space. To get Apple to play on my system to the quality level that Tidal connect is capable of, I need a hard wired Apple device with an external DAC which is great in theory, but very inconvenient. I have recently started trying the HiFi plus and I personally prefer it because it is even more open spacious than hifi, however blind tests tend to show others preferring basic hifi. I have done this at least 6 times and I never tell them which is which and I shift the order all the time. When I play Apple over AirPlay to a relatively high end system and ask people to tell me whether they prefer it to Tidal, Tidal always wins. ![]()
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