11/21/2023 0 Comments Tidal vs qobuz redditBoth Spotify and Tidal will present the user with personalized playlists, based on listening history and algorithmic jiggery-pokery. There’s not a huge amount of difference here. Tidal has a very similar feature now, called - can you guess? - ‘Tidal Connect’. But the advantage it held for quite a while with ‘Spotify Connect‘, which allows paying customers to stream directly to systems on a common network, has lately been removed. Tidal has to make do with integration into Apple CarPlay. Spotify’s ‘Car Thing’ (a little touchscreen device to enable safe and stable streaming while you’re driving) is a nice point of difference. And naturally enough both Spotify and Tidal support Google Chromecast and Apple AirPlay. It’s available on iOS too, and can be integrated into your Sonos system. Tidal can be accessed via quite a few televisions, too - it’s pretty much a fixture on the Android TV interface. Its app also shows up on any number of smart TV interfaces. Spotify is available on the most recent Sony and Microsoft games consoles, for example, and can be accessed on quite a few smartwatches and other connected wearables too. Obviously both services have been working on making themselves available on as wide a variety of platforms as possible. Spotify has been promising a ‘HiFi’ tier of its own for quite a while now - but details (of the launch date, of the number of titles that will be available, and of exactly what ‘HiFi’ means in this context) remain sketchy in the extreme. ‘Tidal Masters’ use MQA technology to stream at a giddy 9216kbps. A top-of-the-shop ‘HiFi Plus’ subscription, meanwhile, buys access to some music mastered in Sony 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos spatial audio, plus access to millions of truly high-resolution audio titles. Tidal, by way of contrast, streams at a CD-quality 1411kbps on its ‘HiFi’ tier. If you’re paying for Spotify, rather than using the free tier, everything comes across at 320kbps. Spotify’s streams run at three compression rates: a frankly miserly 96kbps, 160kbps and 320kbps. Here’s where the most significant differences between Spotify and Tidal can be found. Unless you’ve particularly catholic tastes (I am still waiting for Ginger Thompson’s glorious Boy Watcher to show up on either service), you’ll be able to find the content you’re after on either Spotify or Tidal. I like both, but for different reasons.When you’re talking about numbers of this size, it’s obvious there’s a massive amount of overlap between the two libraries - the likes of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell notwithstanding. So, to summarise: TIDAL for a quick engaging fix of music, Qobuz for all day relaxing listening. I can listen to Qobuz all day long and enjoy having the music in the background. The music doesn’t distract me while I’m working. There isn’t the emotional pull from the music that I get with TIDAL. However, the sound from Qobuz is like velvet, it’s like honey. Coming from TIDAL the UI is all over the place, there’s a distinct lack of useful suggestions and I find it difficult to find songs that I like. Qobuz as a desktop app is hard work, to be honest. TIDAL’s management of the DAP’s filesystem for offline content appears to be a lot better than Qobuz so there’s far less lag in my DAP. The space saved on my micro-SD card for large offline TIDAL playlists is substantial. MQA works really well for me for offline listening on my DAP. Having said that, it can become fatiguing after a while. In fact, it’s engaging to the point of distraction if I am streaming TIDAL all day in the background while I work. Ignoring MQA for a moment, TIDAL FLACs deliver a really engaging sound. TIDAL is a long way ahead in terms of songs availability for the genres that I like (library), suggestions (Track Radio, Masters Track Radio, Artist Radio, Producer Mix, My Mixes, My Daily Discovery) and UI. I’m running both in parallel at the moment and they both have a place for me with each one having pros and cons.
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