Is it time for Tidal... Again

I have an old gen NDX, but I have just purchased a Primare NP5 as a new streaming front end to link into the NDX’s DAC section. At the moment it doesn’t offer Tidal or Qobuz natively, but there is an update from Primare coming early May which will enable the NP5 to natively play both.

As you say the buffer size of the NDX would struggle with Hi Res FLAC, this is a neat solution which doesn’t cost the earth. At the end of the day the DAC in the NDX is plenty good enough. This would also give me the option of acquiring a pre loved NDAC which will certainly offer an improvement in SQ at some point in the future.

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I have to say 100% that Tidal hi-fi sound (CD quality) sounds really good through my system (NAC 272) and was one of the things that made me swipe my credit card at the demo I had. You can try give it a go on trial. I can’t remember if it is a week or monthly trial that they offer :-).

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1411 flac is 16/44, or CD quality, not hi res. Hasn’t Tidal has always offered that alongside the MQA hi res (but non-lossless) higher cost streams?

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I use Tidal HiFi and for only £9.99 a month think it’s rather good. Not quite up to local streaming standard but still very good in terms of its catalogue, reliability, sound quality and user interface. I don’t yearn for Hi-Res at all.

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I too am using Tidal in the HiFi tier at 1411 - can’t make any discernible difference between that or ripped CDs, so must be fine. This HiRes and MQA stuff really does my head in. If cd quality at 16/44 1411 is 99% of what you can hear, why are people going mad for anything above that?

Is it like Mt. Everest - because it’s there? :grinning:

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I still have Tidal (Hifi) and Qobuz side by side. I started out with Tidal and added Qobuz later for their HiRes non-MQA catalogue and the general preference for QB here.

For SQ it’s still not a clear cut comparison for me. On average I’d say Qobuz HiRes wins 6 maybe 7 out of 10 times. With non HiRes is a draw imo. But I do tend to prefer the somewhat ‘snappier’ sound from Tidal.

That said, I find the user interface from Tidal on iOS or computer clearly better than Qobuz. Plus Tidal’s recommendations and Daily Discovery is miles ahead on anything from Qobuz. And there is still no Connect feature in Qobuz either… :smirk:

Tidal announced/confirmed that they will offer non-MQA HiRes FLAC in the near future. If that happens, my Qobuz subscription ends the same day.

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Qobuz is aweful on UI/UX across their platforms. I’m only there since I found they sound bit better than Tidal. The day Tidal sounds as good I’m leaving Qobuz in a second.

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There is/has been a lot of debate about benefit of higher resolutions, with people making claims about audible benefits, and about no benefit. One difficulty in comparing is that hi res and CD quality are not always from the same master, in which case either could sound better and nothing to do with resolution!

The 2L.no website used to have a “test bench” page from which you could download a couple of dozen or so of their excellent sound quality recordings each at a variety of different resolutions all derived simply by downsampling from the same highest res master. From those it was possible to compare for yourself, with a range of music, including blind given a willing volunteer or by setting a random play function. Sadly they seem to have stopped doing that.

My impression from reading multiple comments over several years is that with the same mastering differences are not dramatic, but possibly best thought of as a fine refinement. The most consistent description, which is consistent with my own feeling, is that higher resolution give a little extra “air” or atmosphere to the sound. To me it is worth a slight price premium, but not a great one. But my own experience in comparing is only streaming from my own store, not online, for which the possibly greater limitation of the online process might negate the benefit.

Flac is just a container - even MQA tracks on Tidal are technically served as Flacs.

Conversely, for some tracks (not for all), even when you are on Hifi tier, the Flac file served is a MQA-encoded track… it just isn’t “unfolded” before playback.

The earlier streamers are updatable to stream 24 bit data. I don’t think I’ve experienced any problems with my Uniti 1, and that’s been upgraded with the new DAC at Naim’s factory. Whether the buffer’s big enough is something we’ll have to wait and see.

Totally agree - people pick up differences in sound with different masters. CD quality vs hires quality just seems so so small. So much that Tidal makes complete sense - it works on the old streamers like the NDX and the UI/UX is really good for navigation / discovery. I’d completely recommend it for someone that wants simplicity and great sound. Full disclosure, I’m also a Qobuz/Spotify/Apple Music/Roon subscriber. They all have their individual qualities depending on the use case, but Tidal seems to be the best all rounder

But hey, everybody’s looking for different things…

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Any thoughts on how the legacy streamers as NDS, 272 etc will handle native Tidal if they would offer hi-res audio files without MQA later this year? Would naim need to update their software or would it just work?

It’s a pretty safe bet that they won’t be able to handle 24 bit web streams so you’ll likely need to run a proxy server to get them working, as with Qobuz.

But they support 24/192 so what would be the issue?

They support up to 24/192 local streams, but with a web stream even 16/44.1 is only just within the ability of the very small buffer to maintain a connection to a remote server. The round trip delay is often too long, causing the buffer to empty before the next packet of data arrives, resulting in dropouts.

Are you sure about that? This from their product info.

From network streams to digital inputs

In addition to a network connection for UPnP streaming and internet radio, the NDS incorporates three high-resolution S/PDIF digital audio inputs, and a USB input for audio stored on USB memory stick. Its network connection can be either wireless or wired, and the NDS can play audio files, including iTunes libraries, stored on a computer or on network-attached storage. Each digital input comprises a different connection socket option: coaxial BNC, coaxial phono and optical TosLink, to provide yet greater versatility and optimised sound quality.

The NDS can play all common, and some not so common, audio file and >>> stream formats at up to 24bit/192kHz resolution : WAV, FLAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, AAC Windows Media-formatted content, Ogg Vorbis and MP3. The NDS also recognises M3U and PLS playlists formats and supports gapless playback across all formats.

Yes, the 1st gen streaming platform was designed quite a long time ago and did not originally support any internet streaming services. Naim just about managed to get 16/44.1 Tidal streaming reliably, but you really need a larger buffer to cope with a web stream compared to the equivalent local stream from a UPnP server.

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It is indeed exactly like @ChrisSU says.

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Here’s Naim’s technical view explicitly talking about Internet streaming.

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