Tidal sucks

[jhwalker]

3 hours ago, Cebolla said:

 

Hi Fridolin,

 

I believe the problem albums are ones that TIDAL have their tracks originally encoded as lossy MP3 in their archive and have never bothered upgrading to lossless formats, ie, ALAC (to supply the Apple ecosystem) and FLAC (for everyone else). These (old) MP3 album file tracks are mostly at 320 kbps bitrate, but some are at lower quality 256 kbps, eg:

Núcleo - José Luis Gutiérrez Trio

 

There's a further problem in that the majority of audio devices that can stream directly from TIDAL's online servers with a TIDAL HiFi account connection, for some reason cannot stream the original MP3 file tracks and are are supplied the lowest quality 96 kbps AAC streams instead - such as your Auralic Aries Mini.

 

I know of only two TIDAL HiFi supporting devices/platforms that can still stream the original lossy TIDAL MP3 album tracks (320 kbps or 256 kbps):

- Roon;

- ickStream (for Squeezebox type devices via the Logitech Media Server).

 

John

 

I just checked - Audirvana streams AAC 320 on the ones I checked from the list above.

 

So it's not necessarily that "Tidal sucks", as the title of this thread states - if they have the lossless version, that's what you get.  If they have a lossy version, they're not going to "upgrade" it to lossless, they'll stream what they have (in some cases, I suspect there is no lossless version available).