MUSIC STREAMING REVIEW: TIDAL HIFI
Tidal HiFi Is Still the Safest Bet for Audiophiles Streaming Music
Largest hifi library among music streaming apps
Verdict
Tidal HiFi remains unbeaten in catalog size and sound quality, but their leadership is dragged drown by biased recommendations and a pricey subscription.
If Tidal HiFi is not for you, read about Qobuz, Amazon Music HD and Apple Music.
- Strengths: sound quality, largest catalog available
- Weaknesses: biased recommendations, price
Key information
- Type of service: hifi on-demand music streaming
- Cost: $19.99/month, first 30 days free
- Audio formats: lossless, FLAC at 16bit/44.1kHz (CD quality), MQA typically 24 bit/96 kHz
- Declared catalog size: 60 million tracks
- Platforms: mobile, desktop, smart TVs and streamers, car, home audio players. See complete list.
Experience
Tidal has its own personality. Its use of black as a predominant color, with gray and white for texts gives it certain gravitas. That they heavily promote high quality audio through Tidal Masters and new artists through Tidal Rising only adds to that gravitas.
In terms of usability, Tidal is quite good. Not quite as good as Spotify and Apple Music are, but definitely ahead of Qobuz and Amazon.
They divide their mobile app in four tabs. The home page features at the very top a slider that typically promotes editorials, pre-sales, video content, new albums and playlists.
The fact that Tidal gives a whole section of their app to video says a lot. This section is rich in content and is far ahead of other streaming services, with the exception of YouTube Music. The video section contains video playlists, exclusive performances, video albums, documentaries, behind the scenes, interview series “In conversation” and other shows.
Finally, My Collection includes your saved music. Inside My Collection, you can find a specific area for downloaded music. The section also includes My Mix, a customized mix automatically generated based on your history.
However, Tidal is not the best at recommendations. Tidal recommends a certain type of musical, often related to its owners. If that is not your type of music, Tidal is a big disappointment in terms of discovery.
Catalog size and sound quality
Tidal’s sound is excellent. The difference against free and premium plans is evident and rewarding.
Like Qobuz, Tidal HiFi offers the entirety of their catalog in CD quality, plus a selection of albums in higher resolutions. Tidal does this by leveraging MQA, a super efficient way to compress music files at a higher quality than CD. Tidal can deliver this on their mobile apps, as long as your gear is prepared to handle MQA.
Additionally, like Deezer, Tidal offers a selection of albums for 360 Reality Audio, a new audio format developed by Sony to provide a 360-degree audio experience through streaming.
I recruited my wife to carry out some very basic blind tests to compare Tidal against Qobuz and it was impossible for us to choose a winner. Even when we compared the controversial MQA versus the hi-res audio of Qobuz, our favorite would change as we played different songs.
It is a tie between Qobuz and Tidal in sound quality, but Tidal is the absolute leader in catalog size with 60 million songs, only matched by Apple Music. However, size is not all that matters. In the end, you want a streaming service to have the music you search for.
I spent a lot of time searching albums on Tidal and its competitors to assess their catalogs. On the one hand, I wanted a benchmark that would be useful to most of my readers, so I searched the first 200 albums on Rolling Stone magazine list of “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
I also wanted to see how Apple did at finding the music that I was searching for my personal use, so I noted down all my music searches for 3 weeks.
On the first test, Tidal performed very well. It found 93% of the top 200 albums on the Rolling Stone’s list. No other service scored higher, but Apple Music, Deezer, Pandora and Spotify all reached that same mark. Qobuz, Tidal’s direct competitor in the hifi arena, found 92%.
I was also able to find 84% of my personal searches. Of all the services I tested, Spotify came in first with a success rate of 86% and Amazon Music Unlimited, Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer all came ahead of Tidal. But Qobuz, Tidal’s only found 77% of my searches.
As an audiophile, I connect with Qobuz on every level, but because of the holes in their music library, I would say that Tidal HiFi is still the safest bet for audiophiles streaming popular music, but I encourage you to try searching your favorite albums in both services. You may obtain different results from mine, especially if your searches go deeper into jazz and classical music.
Additionally, Tidal also has a music store where albums and tracks can be bought in MP3 or FLAC. You cannot upload your personal files to Tidal. If you are looking for that kind of integration with your personal library, you will be happy to hear that Tidal is fully integrated with Roon and Audirvana.
Integrations
Tidal is widely integrated. Aside from the standard mobile and desktop apps, Tidal can be accessed from a fair selection of home audio players, streamers, smart TVs and cars. See complete list.
Sadly, Tidal does not support Siri or Google Assistant. It does work with Alexa.