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A lot of the draw for Tidal is the lossless streams. That is a big deal for audiophile people, which you and your friends are not a part of.

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It's a big draw for clueless people. It would take Superman to tell the difference between lossless audio and a modern codec with a decent bitrate. I would be surprised if you can prove that a single person has ever done so on an ABX test.

The only reason to use lossless audio is for archival. Obviously streams are useless for that.

I know 100% that you're wrong, but I don't blame you for making that statement.

The problem with "can't hear the difference" statements is that they're highly dependent on the system you're listening to. The vast majority of systems are not resolving to a degree that there is an audible difference between AAC or a lossless format.

On my system, there is a profound difference between FLAC (at any bitrate) and higher rate DSD. Is DSD magically better? Not necessarily, but in my case my DAC bypasses its internal filtering for DSD playback, which means I can move the interpolation filter over to my CPU, which, running at 4GHz, is better at it than a (SOTA) DAC chip running at a few MHz.

It's a complicated topic, and the only people I personally discuss it with are professional audio engineers or serious hobbyists. No one else cares.

On topic, TIDAL is great in the sense that it's not US-centric for billing (just take my money please) and streams lossless. It's like a CD store for ~$20 a month (the max they'll take from me). I'd gladly pay a lot more and given the economics of it I'm worried it will go out of business at some point.

If you're interested in the topic you can check out the Roon community, "minimum vs linear phase interpolation filters", "DSD upsampling" or check out the work of Ted Smith (MIT / software guy turned DAC designer).

You've got a 1-bit DAC at the end of the chain regardless. Making it sound "better" by filtering in a 4GHz processor is golden ear nonsense.

Out of curiosity, what components are in your system that brought you to that conclusion? Hopefully you're not just restating something you read on someone's blog.

Well I can...but how can I prove that to you?

I think you'd have to be able to consistently pass tests along these lines - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...

Where's the evidence that they didn't cherry-pick examples that are intentionally hard to tell apart? It's also dishonest for them not to emphasize how important speakers/amps/etc matter in the test. Of course someone with Apple earbuds or "Beats by Dre" won't be able to tell the difference.

I didn't mean to suggest that the npr article presented _the_ authoritative objective test on the topic. I was only attempting to answer the original question of "how to prove it" - in that - I think its possible to construct such a test.

Does it matter? Why is the anti-lossless crowd even louder than the lossless? What is it to you exactly? If people would rather pay $20 for lossless, vs $20 for not lossless, what is the issue? Sounds like you're getting more for your money in the former. While standard music CD's may be less noticeable, I can absolutely tell TrueHD / DTS Master Audio vs their earlier lossy counterparts on movie soundtracks. Of course this comes down largely to whatever you're playing it on, and most people really don't give a shit about sound to even invest in it. Personally, I think sound is 90% of the movie. Your super ultra turbo street fighter edition 8K tv doesn't make as much of an impact to me.

> If people would rather pay $20 for lossless, vs $20 for not lossless, what is the issue?

This is remarkably similar to the argument people make when backed into the corner for pseudoscientific health claims.

> pseudoscientific health claims

Such as the long-term benefits of anti-depressants? (What is and isn't pseudo-science depends on who you trust)

I can't hear the difference between a CD and a phonograph.

I can definitely hear the difference between an iTunes stream and a CD (maybe not in a car though).

I've successfully ABXed a 320kbps mp3 (that I encoded myself with LAME) vs its original wav file, got it right 20 times in a row.

Although this was a specific audio file I downloaded that was a known pathological case for mp3.

That's probably why GP said "modern codecs", since MP3 has specific known flaws

I second what the other poster said. Audiophiles are either pirates torrenting FLAC for archival purposes, or (if they are classical or jazz fans) they are still buying SACD physical media. I don't doubt that a few people have been attracted to Tidal for lossless streaming, but you can see for yourself just how little Tidal is discussed on audiophile forums, so just saying "audiophiles" doesn't explain where Tidal is actually a thing.

I dunno; I see Tidal discussed on Audiophile forums a lot, in no small part because they've worked out deals to be integrated with commercial lossless/"hi res" players like Roon and Audirvana. Tidal supports both lossless streaming and MQA streaming. (MQA being a kind of weird and controversial lossy-but-high-res audio format, whose biggest difference in practice is probably using different psychoacoustic models and theoretically accounting for theoretically audible timing differences. I've listened to it on good equipment and can't say that I really hear a difference between it and lossless recording.)

In any case, not even audiophiles are buying physical SACDs. There are digital downloads in DSD format, though.

Actually you find that Tidal is the recommended streaming site on most Audiophile forums.

Roon was marketed heavily to Audiophiles and the addition of Tidal was long sought-after. https://community.roonlabs.com/c/roon/tidal

I'd consider myself an audiophile and I exclusively use Tidal for all music-listening nowadays. I know lots of others who use it for the same purposes.

Shady business dealings aside, Tidal is the best and best-looking music streaming service I've used.

I'm a bit of an audiophile and for that reason I do not use ANY music streaming services. None of them have all of the music I want. I have a wide range of high-quality audio and for some artists I have very particular versions/performances of certain tracks that are my favorite.

I've tried streaming services, but it ends up over complicating my experience because I still have to rely on my own hard copies to complete my collection. Further, I am extremely wary of my library up and disappearing. I like to have full control over all of my tracks, meta-data, playlist organization, etc. I won't even buy from iTunes anymore because it's too restricted. Only online music broker I use is Bandcamp because they give me full control of the music I purchased.

Even among my hard-core audiophile friends, admittedly a very small sample, none of them use Tidal.

Actual audiophiles are going to moan about lossless, because its still PCM audio at its core, and not analog.

The source material is not analog either ever since 1995 or so -- 99% of recordings are into digital DAWs, not tape.

One of the funniest things to me in the prosumer audio world is NES sountracks or EDM released on vinyl.

Many if not most of the consumers of that music will never actually listen to the vinyl. They might not even own a turntable. Instead, they purchase the vinyl for music that they listen to elsewhere in order to have full-size artwork and use it as room decoration.

And until recently (and painting with a very wide stroke), the percentage that goes back to the band tended to be better for vinyl than the other formats. Since the record companies saw it as a dead medium, it wasn't really high on their list for negotiations. I've bought vinyl that I never intended to play for that reason.

Well edm was/is released on vinyl for djing purposes although these days most club djs use cds or usb or ableton.

There are still DJs that spin vinyl, but they're rare.

Not rare in the EDM world.

Serious audiophiles are all pirates at this point if they aren't into diving for vinyl. A losslessly-encoded stream is near-worthless compared to a lossless rip, which is actually useful as archival material.

My friends, especially my musician friends, are all pirates. It's by far the most practical way to do music.

I might change my tune if Tidal's streams are easy to save, but I haven't seen any technology for doing that.

The stream is LOSSLESS.

> The stream is LOSSLESS.

I think the word 'archival' is the key word in this sentence:

>> A losslessly-encoded stream is near-worthless compared to a lossless rip, which is actually useful as archival material.

GP isn't comparing on the basis of quality; rather, GP is pointing out that streaming services don't function as an "archive".

It's a reasonable point. Modulo reasonable backup procedure, owning a copy of the track is a more robust as an "archive" than a streaming service that might stop serving the track at any moment.

However, I'm confused by the rest of GP's post. First, I'm not sure why pirating is necessary to get a lossless rip. Second, and perhaps tangentially, I've never understood collectors (of cards, or of coins, or of music tracks).

> First, I'm not sure why pirating is necessary to get a lossless rip.

To rip an SACD, you either need a hacked PS3, or you need to download the rip through a torrent kindly provided by a pirate community member who does have a hacked PS3.

If you signed up for a pirate community to download those SACD rips, you might as well stick around and torrent lots of ordinary CD rips so that you don’t actually have to buy those CDs.

> Second, and perhaps tangentially, I've never understood collectors

I travel a lot, including in countries where mobile data is not cheap and wifi is thin on the ground. It’s nice to have my entire music collection with me on a small portable hard drive.

Secondly, film collectors are inclined to collect, not stream, because they have been bitten by films disappearing from release due to rights issues. Look at how many Criterion Collection releases are no longer available to purchase or stream, for instance, but it’s nice to have your own copy saved on a disk.

Artists upload lossless audio to the internet all the time. I don't understand how anybody can even be bothered to argue their opinion on this matter. A lot of you guys sound like jerks though.

> Artists upload lossless audio to the internet all the time.

It can, in fact, be quite difficult to obtain the 5.1 surround sound layer of an SACD as a digital download for many releases. That is why people are inclined to rip the SACD or torrent someone else’s rip.

It's not fair you're being down voted, because you're absolutely right. I subscribe to both Tidal and Spotify, and Tidal has vastly better quality music (plus a bunch of artists that are not on Spotify...).

If people are listening through some 'Beats by Dr Dre', or Airpods ,or linking to a bluetooth speaker, Spotify is fine.

If someone has a DAC and some decent headphones, or a decent hifi, you can notice the different easily, especially for certain genres. Not all music compresses well.

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