Jay-Z's Tidal.

[Deleted]

Recently, the rapper Jay Z relaunched the subscription streaming music service Tidal, which includes the option to listen to high-definition audio for $19.99 per month. Tidal's HiFi, with its uncompressed audio files, promises a better listening experience than any other streaming service on the market.
Many listeners cannot hear the difference between uncompressed audio files and MP3s, but when it comes to audio quality, the size of the file isn't (ahem) everything. There are plenty of other ingredients to consider, from the quality of your headphones to the size of the room you're sitting in to, well, your own ears.
Can you hear the difference? Take this quiz to find out. One hint: Turn your volume up.

How well did you do? I scored a 3 out of 6, but I'm not sure if I actually heard a difference.

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecor...-audio-quality

[Thermor]

6/6.

Because the hi-def one took the longest to load on my phone =P

[Kuntantee]

$20/month is too much for something that you need to spend extra effort/money to notice. There are theoretical limits on human body and in most cases, "hi-def" is a ripoff. One example is an overwhelming majority of humans fail to recognize the difference between 4-bit and 8-bit images (image and sound are essentially same thing) with a method called IGS quantization.

[Shadowmelded]

6/6 but I've got pretty decent headphones and can be a bit of an audiophile. Funnily enough I actually preferred the coldplay song at a lower quality, but that might just be a subconscious dislike of Chris Martin. Wouldn't spend the money on this though, at least not at that price.

[Rixis]

Couldn't tell the difference. Got 1 right and 2 wrong, before guessing the last 3 without listening to them and getting them all right

[Deleted]

6/6.

Because the hi-def one took the longest to load on my phone =P

Apparently you can't hear it at all on phones, the quality of the speakers isn't high enough! ;p

[Anium]

Fucking Jay Z what a WRAPPER...zzzz

[DesMephisto]

I have a highly rated headphones, I listen to music a lot, and I often preferred the lower quality ones. I could tell which one were high by loading time so I had to randomize my picks later on. To me they all sounded the same.

[Dispraise]

1/6. Could blame my cheap headphones, but really I just guessed very poorly.

Was funny, could definitely tell the difference on the first, but all the rest sounded the same.

[RH92]

4/6, but I was listening to it on a broken speakers in work. I will give it a second try at home.

To be honest, I think the song choice was rather bad to actually show the quality difference because they were songs with a lot of electronic sounds, nothing really going on and are heavily compressed to begin with.

If they gave samples of some more progressive sounding bands (I don't want to say "complex") people would hear more differencies. Because progressive bands put much more thought into recording, mixing and their music is often very rich. I am not saying it is neccessarily a better music, but you are going to hear the difference faster if there is guitar, bass, some synths, vocals and acoustic drumset compared to an electronic drum beat and vocals.

[Lemons]

2/6...I always knew which one was 128 kbps...I never chose that one...but between the 320 and the uncompressed it was really hard to tell the difference.

Honestly, I think the whole Tidal thing is dumb to begin with. I don't give a shit how much money these artists are making...they make MILLIONS to begin with they don't need any more. So I'll never buy a $10 subscription, let alone the $20 high-quality one.

[Acidbaron]

20 a month really? yeah no i rather spend that money on FLAC's and actually own the music.

I'll stick to spotify for now.

[Deleted]

I am using Spotify Premium for a while now, and really do not see any reason why I would want to use/switch to Tidal. For me, the audio quality difference really does not matter that much; jeez, I probably couldn't even tell the difference without directly comparing the samples.

[Mr Anderson]

4/6. I guessed all of them though.

[Ryme]

3/6

You could probably cheat and just measure the load times for each though.

[Deleted]

3/6

You could probably cheat and just measure the load times for each though.

Yeah multiple people said it, but it isn't really a competition, just a curiosity test I guess.

[AeneasBK]

TBH I've seeen very little evidence that most (read 95%+) have a good enough ear for music anyway, so storing music tracks without compression makes very little difference.

I had some Bang+Olufson headphones when I was younger and sure you could tell the difference through them, but most people aren't using £100+ headphones. I've been using MP3 for decades; and back when 64MB was a *big* memory card; having your tracks compressed and at low BpS or w/e meant fitting 3 or 4 albums on instead of half an album. Never looked back really

[Wildtree]

TBH I've seeen very little evidence that most (read 95%+) have a good enough ear for music anyway, so storing music tracks without compression makes very little difference.

The first part, before the comma.. True... Biologically, and scientifically (electronic aspect) true. (all is true, I address the one part tho )
First of, at the end of the day the moment it's a wav file it is digital. The moment it's digital there is ultimately a loss vs analog recording.

Let's showcase that with an image..




The red line is the frequency in analog tech, how it naturally occurs. The steps following the red line is the digitized result.
The latter can never be as perfect as the former.

On top of that comes the humans hearing range from lowest to highest possible frequency. That varies greatly from person to person, and is also influenced by age.
So, at the end of the day, Mister Jay-Z just tries to make a big junk of money off people who have either too much money, or not enough insight. Because he doesn't re-invent the wheel, nor does he offer anything that's better than what's already in existence.
Let alone the storage aspect.... For a collector, have fun storing thousands of wav files vs mp3s. And if you're really concerned about the audio quality, you'd have to go with the vinyl recording, and a state of the art analog stereo system.
Else you're just throwing money out the window lol

[Ryme]

TBH I've seeen very little evidence that most (read 95%+) have a good enough ear for music anyway, so storing music tracks without compression makes very little difference.

I had some Bang+Olufson headphones when I was younger and sure you could tell the difference through them, but most people aren't using £100+ headphones. I've been using MP3 for decades; and back when 64MB was a *big* memory card; having your tracks compressed and at low BpS or w/e meant fitting 3 or 4 albums on instead of half an album. Never looked back really

I dunno, I can't drop below 128kbps any more. I used to store at like 60 odd back in the day, I don't know how I managed, sounds like you're in a tin can.

[Deleted]

Can't tell at all, I chose the 128 kbps most of the time.