TIDAL: music streaming for fussy audiophiles (like me!)

I call myself an audiophile even though I don’t fit a lot of the stereotypes. You won’t find me bragging about my pure silver ‘interconnects’. (Heck, the speakers I’m listening to now are hooked up with solid-core ethernet cable.) Another thing that differentiates me from the audiophile stereotype is that my love affair with audio has been largely… digital. I deeply appreciate how digital audio can capture and reproduce any sound, without adding (much of) its own character.

So if not a digital hating cable snob, what makes me an audiophile? I think it comes down to a love of recorded sound. I’ve been mesmerized by headphones since I was a baby. When I was 6 years old, my Dad came home with some Tannoy bookshelf 2-ways. Ever since, I’ve been moving speakers around, adjusting tone controls and signal processors to extract the maximum amount of musical information on playback. This led me to get involved in multitrack sound recording in middle school, and begin working in recording studios soon after. That’s when I realized there was a whole world of sound that could exist inside a digital signal. I witnessed multitrack analog tapes being digitized, and live microphone signals being routed through digital mixing consoles.

That’s when I realized that done properly, the digital sound is not a sound at all - but a blank canvas on which any other sonic signature can be accurately captured, and later reproduced without any age-related loss. This is fundamentally what I love about digital. It’s a medium devoted to preservation. The timbre of instruments, the reflective qualities of the recording environment, the characteristic distortions of microphones, tube and transistor amplifiers, the compression of analog multitrack tape, the phase shift associated with heavy equalization, the hardness of a fast compressor, the spatial magic of a particular reverb unit - all this is preserved and contained within a digital file. Sounds are placed within an endless timbral expanse, bounded only by the processes in the recording.

The “digital sound” of perceptual coding #

Seeing as the whole reason I love digital is its ability to preserve and reproduce the ‘bounding boxes’ imposed by the recording process, you can imagine how much I like it when another bounding box is put on top of the digital signal. Just in case you have no imagination, let me be clear: I hate it.

There are a few different ways that the digital signal can become put ‘back in a box’, but all involve constraining the sound. Despite the excellent overall sound quality of mp3 files, they still discard sonic information which is deemed by the encoder to be perceptually irrelevant. Most of the time, for most people, the encoder’s assessment of what is irrelevant is correct, but for the fussy audiophile, nothing is irrelevant.

I was so happy when the FLAC format was introduced a few years ago. At the time, I was already running a recording studio and was wasting a lot of bandwidth or postage money sending uncompressed - but lossless - WAV files around. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. While the quality is bit for bit identical to a CD or WAV file, the size is substantially smaller. So, I started ripping all my CDs to FLAC files, and eventually deleted every single mp3 file from my computer. Then I got rid of all my CDs. Then my hard drive died.

Thankfully, by this time practically every song ever was available on YouTube, but now I was back to some of the worst quality digital audio around. When Spotify came around offering 320kbps mp3 files on-demand, it was a breath of fresh air. Yet, something was still missing from the CD quality I had grown accustomed to. TIDAL to the rescue.

What I like about TIDAL #

FLAC #

TIDAL is a niche product in the streaming sphere. At twice the price of its mp3-peddling competitors, the lossless FLAC-streaming service still offers an excellent value for the kind of person who has invested say, twice as much in their stereo system as the average person. Now consider that many audiophiles, myself included, have spend thousands of dollars on speakers and related playback equipment, while the ‘average person’ has spent exactly nothing, listening only through their laptop, TV, or included cell phone earbuds. TIDAL is looking pretty well priced for audiophiles.

From my perspective, the benefit of FLAC streaming is that you can basically forget about buying and storing physical CDs, or maintaining a digital collection of FLAC files. These are all just regular benefits of a streaming service, but until I had lossless streaming available, I still preferred to listen to my local, lossless copies of music I owned. Now I don’t have much reason to think about my local music collection at all, which is kind of awesome.

Web player #

Like more than few “fussy audiophiles”, I use Linux. It gives me a lot of control over the audio routing, resampling and processing. I use it to implement active crossovers that drive various speaker systems that I’m prototyping. (Right now, it’s 3-way “laptop system” with dipole 2.5" mids, 1" waveguide tweeters, and a sealed box 5" subwoofer.)

Spotify tried, I’ll give them that, to please Linux users, releasing a version of their standalone app which I suspect is little more than a port of the OSX version. Unfortunately, it doesn’t conform to Linux UI theme specifications and I would end up entering white text in a white form field. This happens when you release closed-source, proprietary UI software into an ecosystem that fundamentally doesn’t work that way.

Thankfully, TIDAL has completely sidestepped the issue of multiplatform software development by offering a web-based player. So far, the FLAC streaming only works in Chrome, but that’s all good - let Google handle the multiplatform software development!

(Considering the existence of open source FLAC decoders in Javascript, I see no reason this feature couldn’t be offered in other browsers. Probably something security related?)

I am a big fan of web-apps, especially for web-services. Do you install Google? Do you install Facebook? For that matter, do you install Netflix? I don’t see the value. If it’s a web service, use the website. Anything else is just added overhead. So no, I don’t want to install Spotify or iTunes to listen to web streams.

For audiophiles on Linux, TIDAL’s web player is a major win over Spotify and Apple Music. (Rdio also got this right, but unfortunately no longer exists!)

Is TIDAL for you? #

You should give TIDAL a (free) try if you:

I have found it to be superior to Spotify in every regard - UI, curated content, and of course sound quality.

 
4
Kudos
 
4
Kudos

Now read this

Sennheiser HD558 mods

When the headphones I’d been eyeing suddenly dropped in price by 60%, I had to take the plunge. At $120, I’d never spent this much on headphones before, but that didn’t stop me from ripping them apart right away. :P Acoustic mods: less... Continue →