Music stream

[Ferenc75]

I have premium Spotify subscription but the music sound quality for me isn't great. Is there anything better than Spotify? I tried Tidal because I read that high quality etc but the premium price subscription shocked me. 

Any recommendations I much appreciate...

[WinstonSmith]

The highest level of Tidal is a way better than Spotify.
Spotify has still lower sound quality, than old good CD.
If you are an audiophile,
you will need a High Resolution Audio player,
they are able to play the lossless, highest quality available, but the highest quality of these items are over £1K.
But it's like everything luxurious, the top of the top.
The highest possible quality, cutting-edge technologies,
the highest level of cuisine,
wines, Champagne,
or something else,
will be always expensive.
If you want the best,
the top,
you have to be prepared to pay also the premium prices.

[Ferenc75]

Ok most of the part agreed what you mentioned. 1 more question please. Tidal has the basic hifi monthly sub are still better than Spotify premium? Or I have to Tidal Hifi plus if I want better than Spotify premium? Thanks

[WinstonSmith]

Hi-fi Plus is their the highest level of Tidal,
is Hi-fi Plus.
But you will also need a superb headphones.
Something with Hi Resolution Audio frequency response.
In the ideal case the wired headphones.
Because the Bluetooth headphones are still worse than the wired headphones,
thanks to compression necessary for the wireless transmission.

[Ferenc75]

Thanks for your response

[WinstonSmith]

The highest possible level is
Astell&Kern brand.
Is like a Rolls-Royce of the Hi-Res Audio players.
But,
with a hefty prices, too.
Nothing better is available.
https://www.astellnkern.com/product/product_detail.jsp?productNo=138

[RXM]

Just checking. Did you go into the settings and change the sound quality to "very high" as it is not set to that by default. Though their "very high" isn't exactly what I'd class as very high, but is going to sound acceptable/good to most people. A set of wired headphones and a subscription to a service which offers lossless quality music will make a decent difference to the sound quality. Using a DAC/amp will also be a good investment however I'd advise not getting too financially invested into the audiophile world as it's quite easy to fall down the rabbit hole and spend mountains of cash if you're not careful for products which in turn provide negligible or imperceptible increases in audio quality.

Also needs to be said but Tidals MQA is nothing more than a cash grab in my opinion and even if you have the hardware to fully decode MQA tracks there's no evidence that the track being listened to is lossless, nevermind "better than". Saying that, I do like Tidal, it's just too expensive and there are too many albums that only have MQA versions (or were at least, not sure if anything has changed

[Ferenc75]

The biggest problem is me to behonest because I don't like wired headphones and I know Bluetooth is not the same quality as wired connection. Thanks for your response was very helpful. Have a good day