Hello everyone. I have Spotify and i'm willing to chance to Tidal. Is the Quality of sound better? I do see when i play songs "low" / "high" / MAX.

About a year ago I changed to Tidal, from Spotify, but I still use Spotify for podcasts. The primary reason as to why I switched to Tidal is the bitrate (I went for their at the time HiFi 1XXX bitrate subscribtion as a student). I had just gotten my Sony WH-1000XM5 at the time, but I often find myself wondering why in the world Tidal does not have certain songs, altough their libary is huge I've never had this problem with Spotify before. So my question is whether or not Tidal is actually better in terms of audio quality when listening though Sony WH-1000XM5, or the Sony Linkbuds-S

i just started tidal's free 1 month trial because I've been getting so tired of spotify's bull over the past few years. (the increased focus on AI, this year's awful wrapped, all the typical corporate stuff, premium getting more expensive every year, etc)

I can't really find any good pros other than it's not spotify. with tidal, as far as I know, you can't change your playlist covers, you can't add a pfp unless you have one of 3 apps I don't ever intend on getting, the mechanism of adding songs to playlists is more time consuming than it should be, etc.

i REALLY want to like this app. i'm looking for good music apps other than spotify or apple music, but I keep running into things on tidal that would be a downgrade from spotify. if i'm paying about the same each month, it's gotta be better overall.

are there any features tidal offers that set it apart from and above spotify? if so, what are they?

Edit: for context, I don't have any quality sound systems -- my crappy bluetooth earbuds recently broke so i've been stuck with wired, my car's sound system is abysmal, and I don't have headphones. good quality sound is REALLY nice, but I don't currently have access to a way to benefit from that feature.

Do you hear that Tidal (Hifi) has better music stream quality (higher bit rate) than Spotify (Premium) and can you give an example song?

I know you get cd level sound quality but I’ve heard the app is quite glitchy, also Spotifys recommendations are what have formed about 90% of my music taste so idk if tidals recommendations are as good. Can someone help me decide?

Update: I got the tidal free trial to try it out and while the quality was slightly better, I soon realised that there was no (free) way to transfer my (multiple) playlists with over 700 tracks, so looks like I’ll be staying with Spotify for now. Thanks for all the replies

UPDATE UPDATE: Bro wth it’s been like ten minutes I went back to Spotify and it’s literally unlistenable now what is this sorcery. Tidal it is. Just a little quieter than Spotify is all

Hi, I have been streaming same tracks on Tidal and Spotify since today and it's looking like Spotify is sounding a little bit better than Tidal. Is it my ears or is there something I am missing? Anyone experiencing same?

I’m thinking about moving because tidal has better audio quality and pays artists more. I have Spotify premium and am looking at getting the Tidal equivalent. On an iPhone and car has Apple car play and I need Alexa compatibility. I don’t use AI features or listen to podcasts on Spotify, so I presume I won’t miss out on anything.

Edit: I’m going to use the 30 day free trial

I used to use Spotify until around April this year when I thought I'd give Tidal a try with their free trial on the Hifi+ tier subscription and I haven't looked back. It may cost twice as much as Spotify but the quality is second to none so I'm just curious what you guys prefer using to stream music.

Even with my Bluetooth earbuds and compressed audio I can hear the difference, everything is less mushed together and the sound just feels so much more substantial, can't wait to try it tonight with my wired headphones

I always just stayed on Spotify for convenience sake but even that is gone now, it's just an ad plastered social media app with a maximum of 3 artists that get auto played on it.

I see a lot of complaining on this reddit so just wanted to post a positive post saying that I love the service, it's so clean and smooth

I’ve used Spotify forever but since joining this sub and others like it I’ve read a lot about how Apple Music and Tidal have way higher audio quality. I don’t have a fancy setup at all, I use the wired earbuds that come with iPhones and have edifier bookshelf speakers at home for my vinyls. Is it worth it to switch to Apple Music or tidal with this equipment? I’d have to convince my entire family to switch to the family plans of either service so if it’s not a noticeable difference I’ll wait until I have a higher quality system and can get one of them for myself

I am thinking of changing from spotify after the increase in ai support and the fact that they don't support artists that well. I'm not great with change and really struggle changing anything that I'm used to but Tidal seems almost exactly like spotify but better in every way from the research I've done. It almost seems too good to be true. Is there any disadvantages to it? How quickly do new releases come on the platform? How wide a range of a discography does it have? I enjoy finding niche artists will they be on there? Are there any features spotify has that tidal doesn't that you missed (if you used it) or had to get used to when you changed?

today i finally made the decision to retire my spotify account and create a tidal account. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. i go to an audio engineering school and even our professors suggest it to us

2. feels like spotify is starting to pull a “netflix” move by constantly increasing the price of a subscription a little bit every month, but not necessarily offering anything new or better

3. how many of us just have our spotify because we had it since middle school? me too. i keep getting recommended the same shit every day and it genuinely has me feeling like i’ve listened to everything when i know that’s not the case. i used to really like their layout but now the only way i can hear something new is by listening to other peoples playlists.

4. spotify is just incompatible with way too many things. seems like apple just has the most flexibility overall when it comes to 3rd party programs.

5. no 360 audio no dolby atmos? wonder how much they’ll charge when they introduce that.

6. songs just become unavailable at points and then become available again, fake pages constantly leaking. artists randomly taking down their work which i kinda understand

—— overall, i just want to feel like i’m getting more for my money- and not JUST spending more. So i got tidal today. I used Soundiiz to convert my playlists and here are my first impressions:

1. i notice a change in sound quality that i actually like, at least for the music i regularly listen to. it’s subtle. this alone isn’t enough for me to prefer Tidal yet but i can definitely see it changing.

2. it bugs me that they are not compatible with Roku. from what i read there WAS a Tidal app on Roku that has since been taken down for whatever reason. Even pairing my phone to my roku and playing music from my phone caused some weird glitch where certain songs just wouldn’t play. The playhead moved but there was silence.

3. there are quite a few songs that Tidal just doesn’t have access to. this bothered me cause they claim to have over 100mil songs which is about the same as spotify.

4. their layout it something i have to get used to. it’s sleek but like it doesn’t feel fun. i don’t have enough data stored on their to know whether it’s as personal as spotify can be. I like that their layout shows music videos too.

I’ll come back and update when I have more to say. But for now let me know what you think. What are you streaming on? What would you suggest to me?

EDIT: just realized that you’re not able to pair to devices on a local network with Tidal. this definitely could form my opinion differently. i can’t listen to tidal on any device without pairing to my phone which gets annoying when certain apps turn off your music or just play right over your shit. idk gang spotify up 65%

T: tidal, A: apple music, S: spotify)

Use time:

T: 1 month

A: 3 months

S: 4 months

Audio quality:

T: 9/10, sounds great, but i don't really like MQA

A: 7/10, not as good as Tidal

S: 6/10, very similar to Apple Music, sometimes a bit quieter

Discovery/recommendations

T: 6/10, i only used Tidal for a month but my recommendations were good, I enjoy the daily mixes a lot

A: 5/10, they were fine

S: 10/10, i discovered SO many new artists and songs on Spotify, curated playlists are top notch

UI/UX (android)

T: 9/10, looks very clean, smooth, everything is laid out well, but i encountered some very minor bugs

S: 8/10, kinda messy but never buggy

A: 3/10, android app is rough and unpolished, very buggy, the iPad app once glitched so hard to the point where it was unusable

Other features:

T: when a song is created by 2 or more artists, you can choose which artist's profile you want to go to (there's no way to check the profile of the featured artist on AM)

A: ....idk

S: song psychic/playlist in a bottle and podcasts (but they're kinda useless)

Hello there, fellow Redditers, I keep seeing folks talk about the audio quality of Tidal versus Spotify, I would like those who have it to give some detailed input on the quality of basic tidal versus Spotify, and if you do have the hifi, is the hifi enough better to warrant the extra cost? Do you have to have an impressive audio setup to notice it? I listen on a decent pair of headphones from China, care of Amazon, actually decent sound quality for their price range tho. I the car on stock speakers, and on an okay sound at a polk signal S4, which has significantly better sound quality than anything else I use but probably still is what it is. Not a hardcore receiver and speaker setup and no fancy headphone, tho looking around for them in reviews and hoping to get some black Friday

I just got a Tidal membership for the first time yesterday and was immediately surprised when I shuffled Nine Inch Nails and the first few tracks to pop up were remixes or non-singles. Mixes seem to have a much more "This is the song you will like" feel, as opposed to "This is the song you SHOULD like, based on our algorithm's interpretation of one billion people's opinion."

I've only had the subscription for a day, so maybe I'm missing something, but it makes me wonder who services are FOR. Personally, I'm thrilled. This style of curation is very much up my alley. I got really tired of Spotify assuming I wanted to (sticking with NIN here) listen to "Closer" or "The Hand that Feeds" for the thousandth time. I want to encounter new and surprising tracks by artists I already know really well.

What do you look for when you go into an unknown listening experience? Familiar bops or uncharted territory? Why would the two services take such different approaches?

I've been using Spotify for years, but I figured that since I have a pretty decent setup (Fiio K5 Pro + Hifiman Sundara), I should switch to Tidal to get the maximum audio quality possible. So I signed up for a free Tidal trial and started going back and forth between Tidal and Spotify using a bunch of songs in my library. Unfortunately, I can't seem to hear any difference between the two. With volume normalization turned off on both services, I could not make out a single instance where Tidal sounded noticeably different. The amount of bass, the clarity of the vocals, everything sounded exactly identical between the two. I tested using a bunch of tracks including Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, Time by Pink Floyd and Hotel California by The Eagles. Absolutely no difference whatsoever. Is my gear just not good enough, or is there a specific setting in Windows I need to enable? Or is there actually no audible difference?

I'm on the HiFi Plus tier and I can't help but notice that even when I'm listening to music with my Bluetooth earbuds, the music still sounds better than Spotify whenever I do a side by side comparison.

I know many will say it's placebo but no, this is real. Spotify sounds very muddy in comparison to Tidal's HiFi and Master tracks.

I have two Questions.

First is there a difference in sound quality that I notice even if I’m not an audiophile?

Second is the algorithm nearly as good as Spotify’s.

Example: When I create a Spotify playlist it shows me right under it songs that match with the playlist. The success rate that I like these songs is somewhat 20%.

The corporate overlords are Spotify are getting greedy again and doing another price increase.

I'm fine to pay it, but I hear Tidal has a great interface and pays the bands better.

Does anyone here use Tidal and can vouch for the metalcore library? Spotify actually does an amazing job of helping me discover new bands. I just saw Make Them Suffer and I actually knew every song without knowing it because I just let Spotify do its thing while I'm working.

I’ve been testing Spotify’s new Lossless tier against Tidal over the last few days. This review is purely about sound quality, not the ethics, payouts, or anything else.

I listened across a mix of genres (electronic, rock, blues, jazz, indie) and carefully matched volume between the two. Honestly, they sound identical to my ears. I could not pick out any noticeable differences switching back and forth.

So if you are only considering audio quality, Spotify’s Lossless holds up just fine against Tidal. At that point it really comes down to which ecosystem or features you prefer.