Tidal HiFi Quality/ Bluetooth Quality.

cu3ed

cu3ed

cu3ed

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So decided to give Tidal a try ( liking the UI more already).
However, within music quality, i'm confused about how much im getting if I spend the extra for the Hifi quality.
a lot of my music is done Via my own car system ( components Sub etc) Via Bluetooth. ( Samsung S9 to Kenwood Bluetooth V3).
What i'm I really getting if anything at all with the higher quality, or is it a waste with jsut a connection?
I have noticed a difference in my Jabras, less tinny highs and that digital distorted sound on some tracks etc.
 
yes the bluetooth connection is going to bottleneck/compromise potential benefits of the lossless tidal hifi,
although the tidal source will be better than 44.1/16 700Kb/s streamed, it will be compressed using the bluetooth sbc codec at could be just 128Kb/s, best case 256Kb/s;
with a head-unit supporting car play or aptx you might do better.

Have you tried a ripped cd directly on an sd card (flac or high bitrate aac) in the radio to get a feeling of possible sound quality improvement.

AFAIk the high-fi tidal option can only be fully exploited on a phone if you either have a USB DAC (and use the radio aux in !) or use the phones inbuilt DAC.
(if the phone has a good dac - exymos based samsungs not so good - see phones forum)

if you use the aux in on the radio, the HU may re-digitize the signal so that the HU equalizer can be used, but usually Kenwood/Alpine uints have good quality audio processing, so that is not so bad.

.... You could try out a dragonfly usb dac from Richer sounds.
 
Will have to run a few tests, but had higher quality Bitrates on my iPod when connected to the Headunit and there was a notable warmth covering the baselines in tracks. Could be of course just a better connection.
Will have to see if there an Aux/ 3.5mm input to the head unit.
 
I can hear the difference between Spotify 320kb/s and my tidal hifi subscription in two circumstances, both indoors doing 'critical listening' so forget about it for casual listening scenarios like the car etc.

This is with ~3k separates foorstanding hifi and a £320 headphone rig.

Using those I can hear subtle differences in bass fullness/texture and vocals particularly are more natural and resolved.

For anything other than a resolving system I wouldn't worry too much tbh.
 
I used to use tidal, with a Denon CEOL DRA N5 amp and wharfedale 9.1's I noticed more clarity with Tidal.

Spotify is quite clear on my PC, but from TV spotify app the sound is quite muddy / distorted if you turn it up a bit,
 
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