Hacker News Reader

Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

I just switched to Tidal in protest of Spotify’s support of that nonsense app alliance and their constant attacks on the podcast ecosystem.

I really miss when they were laser focused on music. If they drop their bad business practices, I will switch back. For now I’m really feeling the need for competition.

Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately. Tidal is better overall in my experience and as far as I can tell they’re not being anticompetitive in any way.

View on HN

I switched to Tidal about 8 months ago (from Spotify) and I have to say about the only thing it has going for it is the slightly better sound quality.

Otherwise it is completely inferior to Spotify in each and every way, starting with the core functionality that is a train wreck, at least on macOS. I regularly have issues with the scrobbler getting out of sync, recently playback stops after ~5 seconds when waking my mac from sleep and I have to restart it. The experience is just a mess.

On top of that it is 2x the price of Spotify. I am seriously thinking switching back to Spotify just because the SQ difference is not worth the disaster that comes with it.

That’s fair, Tidal is definitely not as good as Spotify in terms of software quality. It hasn’t affected me too badly, but I definitely miss Spotify connect and CarPlay has been spotty.

I’m fully making the switch as protest of business practices, not because Tidal is already better. I hope Tidal gets there but if they don’t I’ll have to reevaluate eventually. I hope Spotify just apologizes for being shitty so I can go back to them.

The one alternative that no one is discussing here is to abandon music streaming and go back to owning our own collections. Yes, it's more work to go through and buy tracks or albums, but once you've done it, you're completely free to listen to them however you want. That also seems to be the best deal for artists that aren't superstars.

For what it's worth, Tidal pays its artists a whole lot more per stream than Spotify does.[1] That's the main reason I'm subscribed to Tidal.

[1] https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-...

> Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately

That's funny, just a few comments up there's someone saying that Apple Music sounds better than Spotify

I commented on another post below, but tldr I suspect Apple is heavily optimized for earbuds and cheap speakers rather than higher end audio equipment which I typically use (if you count ~$150 headphones as high end).

I’m not exactly an audiophile but Apple Music sounds noticeably bad with my headphones to the point I thought they were broken. Then I thought it was my PC but it sounded just as bad on a MacBook Pro.

I've tried both and... don't actually hear much of a material difference between the two. If I understand correctly, Apple's using their old standby of 256Kbps AAC and Spotify uses 320Kbps Vorbis, so Spotify is slightly better on the technical merits -- but they're both at sufficiently high quality that audio nerds would be demanding anyone who claims a definitive difference do some blind ABX testing to prove it.

I ended up sticking with Apple Music after my Spotify Premium trial ran out, but I suspect that's largely because it's what I'm used to. I've seen lots of "Apple Music's recommendation engine is crap," but that's not actually been my experience -- their "New Music Mix" isn't great, but the whole of their "For You" page almost always has stuff I'm interested in and I really like digging through their curated playlists. It's been a much more rewarding service for just digging around exploring in than either Spotify or Tidal have been for me. (Although Tidal undoubtedly has the best sound quality if you're willing to pony up for the lossless/MQA tier.)

256Kbps AAC and 320Kbps Vorbis both comfortably exceed the threshold of audibility for 99.999% of people 99.999% of the time. If you somehow cared about the difference between either of these (or uncompressed, for that matter) then you're not listening to music properly.

The days of 128 Kbps MP3s encoded with L3enc or Xing with horrific pre-ringing and squelched cymbals is long gone.

> Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately.

Why would that be?

When I started using Apple Music (I tried them before Tidal) the music sounded really tinny and sharp - sonic equivalent of an over sharpened image. At first I thought my headphones were broken.

I listen with WH-1000XM3 and ATH-M50x and the Apple Music encoding sounded really, really bad to my ear. It’s not the bitrate, which should be fine, it’s the sound of the audio which is totally different from other services.

I suspect they have optimized for low quality devices like AirPods and earbuds; I expect the oversharpening might be rated as better on those devices.

FWIW Tidal and Spotify sound the same at their standard premium tier. I can’t hear the difference between Spotify and Tidal HiFi on my Bluetooth (AptX) Sony headphones, but I can hear the difference with my wired ATH-M50x.

I recommend listening to the services side by side, preferably with desktop client to compare. In Spotify you may want to adjust the streaming quality to high from auto, as I always do, to be sure it’s a fair comparison. Sadly Apple doesn’t seem to give a choice in quality, but based on reading my understanding is they always default to high - I could be wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com