(not affiliated with spotify and not very pleased with the service in general myself, just saying.)
Edit: watermarking not fingerprinting
I'm currently on a Tidal free trial but I won't be moving from Spotify when it's up. I personally can't tell the difference. Maybe I'm half deaf but ignorence is bliss.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rAITjrK39fiJYOT53ghq9DbC-e4...
If it's helpful for you, the code 'LIDLMUSIC' gives a free 6-month Tidal trial. It might be UK specific I have no idea.
https://open.spotify.com/track/2in7T2TWPkJW6Z6Ih9P4Ew?si=7e6...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTcl20dgHSM
Sounds identical (and very noisy) on Spotify and Youtube on my very crappy laptop speakers. I don't own the CD.
https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermar...
I find it's only good at playing random songs on giant playlists, or playing the radio. Managing a library of albums is a huge pain and I still don't understand how it's supposed to work.
Then there is the problem of questionable digital masters. There's 0 transparency into the mastering process and what Spotify uses. As you've observed, some things just sound really awful on Spotify.
If you really want the best, I suggest Roon + Tidal subscription for playback. Then use Qobuz/Bandcamp/etc. to purchase lossless FLACs to import into Roon, or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality, and you can be certain the source quality is good. You can use Tidal lossless for streaming things you don't buy (but the selection is much more limited). The Roon UX is way, way better than Spotify for managing a large collection of albums.
I think the big thing both Roon and Audirvana achieve sub-optimally is just overall application performance and user experience. They do have a ton of features which help in managing massive audio libraries, far better than Spotify or Tidal alone. But, Roon legitimately feels like a browser app they threw in an iframe and nativefied. Audirvana is better IMO, but isn't as good as Roon at auto-discovering album artwork and metadata-ifying the connections between your local songs for hyperlinking and discovery.
The critical thing that I love about that methodology of music playback is the "synthesis" they both do of Tidal and your local music. There is a ton of music out there that's inaccessible on (all!) streaming services, and every audiophile I know eventually starts amassing a collection of lossless files from Bandcamp/etc. Neither a streaming service nor your local library alone is ever the "complete" view into all the music you want to enjoy; you need both, synthesized into one integrated view. Google Play Music used to be a decent solution to this, not the greatest quality but it solved this problem well, but then Google nerfed it into the ground.
There's still a lot of work to be done in this domain. To be honest, my go-to for local music playback is the same app I've been using for a decade after the fall of Winamp; Foobar (Windows). Its simple, ridiculously performant, infinitely customizable, and works great.
I'm sorely tempted to build my own library/playlist management front-end on top of Spotify's API. They're the only streaming service I've found with an official streaming/remote control API, and with upcoming lossless support (albeit only CD-quality), their library with a tailor-made UI seems like the best trade-off I'm going to get in a music service.
I have a Focal Clear, Schiit Lyr 3, Schiit Bifrost 2 and I can not tell the difference between Tidal and Apple Music. There are tests online which people regularly post on Head-Fi and Reddit which also shows that almost all people can't distinguish lossless from high quality lossy encodes.
> or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality
No it won't.
As Apple describes in their guide for Apple Music they have, "dynamic range that’s superior to red book CD audio" because they transcode from the high-bit masters.
None of this is an issue if you rip your own CDs or buy lossless from reputable sources in my experience. Spotify you're at the mercy of whatever crap Spotify has been given.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-22/five-things-to-know-...
I’ve got a good set of speakers, and coupled with Tidal’s Master[1] quality recordings, there’s just no way I can go back to something of lower sound fidelity.
[1] https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TID...
Would be curious to see if you can pass this test: http://abx.digitalfeed.net
Because what people fail to understand is that from source -> listener there are multiple points at which information is lost. People obsess over the file format but not over which DAC they use or whether Apple, Spotify, Tidal has better encoding capabilities.
Tidal pays musicians something like 3x what spotify does. [0] This is probably still not enough, but at least it's the right direction.
The higher sound quality has just been a bonus.
[0] https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
I have two music libraries: tidal and my own music (I'm using about 80% my own music). The music is well tagged already using picard, so I don't know how well that works out of the box. When I'm in the tidal library, I usually will mark an album/artist to be added to my normal music library and then it will start showing up there mixed in with my self hosted stuff.
The killer features (to me) are 1: playing by album instead of by track. I use the "random album" shuffle all the time and usually want to listen to an album all at once and 2: smart playlist builder which lets me make dynamic playlists around how many times I've played a thing, my personal rating, or when the last time I played it was.
The killer feature is curated metadata, dedicated to classical music: searching and browsing is infinitely superior. You can select a specific work and browse all its recordings. You can select a performer and view all their recordings. You can select a composer and filter their works by type, etc.
EDIT: looks like Amazon HD might force re-sampling of 44.1KHz to 48KHz on Android, which is a shame if true.
my main use case for streaming is android auto, so I lowered my criteria to "no lossy-lossy reencode for bluetooth and works well with google assistant". so yt music was basically the only option for me. I would have tried amazon HD, but apparently google has deliberately made it hard to use with assistant, which hamstrings it for music in the car.
But copyright can also cover the performance itself, not just the underlying music. So even though Beethoven's 9th symphony has long been public domain, for example, the Telarc recording of it by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Celeveland Orchestra & Chorus is not. If you want to do something with that specific recording, you need permission.
Also, a particular arrangement might be copyrighted. Consider Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". That was composed as a piano piece in 1874, and long ago became public domain.
Since then, numerous other composers have arranged it for orchestra, with the most well known arrangement probably being Maurice Ravel's in 1922. There have been dozens of other orchestrations including several this century, and also numerous arrangements for other types of groups and combinations of instruments and solo instruments.
A given recording will only be public domain if the underlying work, the arrangement, and the performance are all public domain.