Tidal, the high-definition music streaming service acquired by rapper and music mogul Jay-Z, is gearing up for its official relaunch under new ownership later today, and it will be doing so by reportedly making a move to snag new releases by some of the biggest musicians of the moment including Kanye West, Madonna and Daft Punk, ahead of rival services like Spotify and Beats.
The streaming business is getting pretty crowded. Apple is late to the game, but they could still make its mark in the industry with a redesigned Beats.
You miss the point – if you’re using earbuds (or most headphones) 256k is fine. The market for high quality streaming is to home systems.
You do realize you’re arguing for less that CD quality, too? Why would anyone argue for a lower quality than you get even off CDs? When MP3 hit the scene it made sense – storage was relatively expensive and download speeds sucked. But now? My iPhone has 128gig of storage and my wifi is 50meg. Even without wifi, LTE is something like 20meg for me. There’s NO reason to stream less than CD quality.
According to Financial Times, those artists have been offered millions and a stake in the company to do the “blue avatar” promotion we’re seeing today. In other words, it’s another pyramid scheme, just like Spotify and the major labels. Only they will make any money. Maybe there’s no freemium tier, and you can pay extra for 16-bit FLAC streaming, but there’s no “turning the tide” or “music history” being made at Tidal. Just a lot of the same bullshit, at a higher bit rate.
256k IS CD quality, in every sense that matters – perceived sound quality. It’s just not lossless.
And that doesn’t matter for anything but editing or recoding.
When you can reliably tell me the difference between 256K MP3/192K AAC / V0 VBR MP3 and CD in a blind test, you can talk to me about “CD quality”.
(I’ll warn you in advance, though.
You can’t tell the difference reliably.
Nobody* can.
Tidal needs to relaunch with a larger catalog and a lower monthly fee to make it close to worth it. I’ll wait to see how the new Beats shakes out before considering a switch from Spotify.
For such a crowded business, it’s still astonishing how few options there are outside of the US.
No =. 256k is LOSSY. By definition, it’s less than CD quality and if you judge audio on earbuds or even less that very very good headphones you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
I see ZERO reason to accept the deliberate loss of information that’s already there.. but then you probably grew up on MP3s