What other streaming services do you recommend besides Tidal?
Been having quite a few dropout issues with Tidal of late and no it is not my connection. These were commonplace late last year, seemed to stop but of last few days have returned with a vengeance especially later at night (higher demand/usage I suppose?). So as $20 a month is no joke for sporadic service and lack lustre customer service I would like to know who uses what other service for hires streaming? Your experiences, problems if any, quality etc. I know my Vault shows me at least 15 other options besides Tidal but I really know nothing of them. Thank you
Here in Europe I am using Qobuz 16/44. The repertoire is great but it also suffers from occasional drop outs (even with a wired ethernet connection and a fast internet). The web browser based interface is fine, apart from the drop outs, but I cannot get the Chromecast app to function flawlessly. I am reluctantly going back to Spotify.
No problem at all with Tidal. If you think $20 is expensive for Tidal then my guess is you have a super slow but cheap internet service and that is your issue.
I stream Tidal and have no signal drop out problems. My sound quality is excellent. I am using an Aurender N10 server with an Ethernet connection direct to my router
How is your Vault connected to the Internet? Tidal streaming requires a wired Ethernet connection (and not Wi-Fi).
I suggest you run a speed test on your connection to ensure your cable speed is what you are paying for. You might ask your ISP to test your Internet signal range. Mine signal was out of the correct range and, yes, I had line drop outs and quality problems. My ISP has to adjust my signal.
My next issue was a failing junction box outside my home impacting me and the entire neighborhood. It was replaced and we were okay. They also had to replace a differential coupler on the cable line.
I also had Internet connective issues caused my Linksys router dropping packets. It was a known issue and no time estimate for repair. I replaced it and my problems were solved.
Pkease review the above suggestions to see if they help. There are many things that can cause these issues and they all need to be checked. I hope this helps.
As I said it is not my connection I believe. Same connection supports 2 x Netflix hd streams, daughter on farcebook, Twitter whatever and me surfing the net ,it is fastest offered at my house.
The vault is hardwired, it does not even allow wireless streaming. I did replace my router late last year when it started and there was a thread on here with people suffering same issue. It made no difference.
@shadorne You twist my words... $20 is not expensive at all...IF you get the service you pay for. And no matter what Tidal customer service is sub standard. 5000 masters titles and can only be bothered to list 500 under the masters tab, the rest you have to hunt for so again not as good as could be. Never hurts to see if the grass may be greener on the other side.
I use Tidal and Spotify. I really don't notice a significant difference, but Tidal is a bit cleaner sounding. I like Spotify because it has a super inclusive catalog (Tidal is more for contemporary music), and it has an easier interface for finding different composers. With Tidal, you have to know what you want to listen to I tried Deezer, but it had an annoying problem of suddenly stopping mid track and starting at the beginning. Customer service was spotty and I dropped them before the trial ended. Sound quality was as good as Tidal. Quobuz is supposed to come to the US soon. Google it and sign up for updates. B
Okay, we are narrowing down the options. After you have your ISP check your line speed, assuming it is okay, I suggest you email Tidal, again, and ask them. I suggest you include in your email all the steps you have already taken to solve the issue.
I know that Tidal has 5,000 MQA Coded albums but my Aurender only displays 500. I complained to Aurender but they report Tidal only codes 500 of the albums as MQA. Based on your post above, I will email Tidal about these missing MQA Coded Albums. I agree this is very frustrating.
My Aurender only supports Tidal and QoBuz. Qobuz is expected in the USA sometime in the summer. I have no experience with it but have been told it is uncompressed and very good. I have no experience with the other services you listed.
@stevecham Oh for sure when Tidal is good it is VERY good, not the slickest interface but as mentioned if you know what you are looking for and want to listen to they have quite a catalogue.
@hgeifman I did email Tidal about the lack of display of masters and got a very mealy mouth reply that basically it is what it is even though I asked just how hard would it be to tab all 5000 under the masters tab, surely a couple of strokes on some programmers keyboard?
@shadorne You could have a viable point with the buffering, to tell the truth that is what it resembles now I think about it. Not dropout as such as it usually picks right up again where it stopped, almost like it is having to buffer the feed and is lacking resource to do so.
I think I am being stiffed by AT&T! Just done two separate speed test, one of which was with the AT&T speed test itself Both came back very close 22.8 mbps and 23.1mbps, that's hard wired speed. Phone call is in order to AT&T tomorrow!
I wonder if your AT&T speed test results above are impacting your Tidal performance. Please ask them to check your signal strength and all other items to ensure your cable line is working okay. NOTE: Mine was not. I need 2 technicians on-site to solve these issues. And, ALSO have them inspect your outside cable box to ensure all is okay (mine was not wired correctly).
On December 28th 2017, Tidal emailed me with the following info:
"Please note: MQA Albums can be found at “What’s New” and select “Masters” in the Albums section. The limited view of MQA albums in this section is a known Tidal issue. The Developers are aware of the limited search capabilities for MQA albums. They are working on advanced search capabilities for MQA. I am sorry for the inconvenience".
It is my understanding that Tidal has 5,000 MQA Coded albums but my Aurender N10 server and your Vault only displays 500. The Absolute Sound also mentioned this issue.
I emailed Tidal and asked them if their advanced search capability for MQA work mentioned above would enable Aurender and Vault to display all 5,000 MQA Coded albums? If Tidal has 5,000 MQA Coded albums, it would be terrific if they were indexed as MQA so that Aurender and Vault could display them on their applications. I will keep you posted.
So after talking with AT&T this morning it appears they made an oops! When they upgraded my service to 75mbps (fastest available in my area), they "neglected" to inform me that they would also need to install a new modem to handle those higher speeds! That is now occurring this Saturday and I also insisted on a refund for having paid for higher speed for 6 months and not having got it due to their error. So will see how it fares after the new modem on Saturday which should allow the 75mbps to take place, thanks to all for the suggestions to tackle the base problem. I "assumed" that as I had 75mbps service I was actually getting said service, see where assume got me here......
I will likely still consider my options once speed is resolved anyway. May give Spotify a trial and possibly Quboz once launched here...cannot stand Jay-z......lol
FWIW - using Tidal and Spotify (premium/hifi subscriptions to both). SQ with Tidal is better but I also experience periodic buffering dropouts, esp. late at night though rarely during the day. Never happens with Spotify. Am paying for Blast Xfinity high speed internet service. SQ with Spotify is NOT terrible - just not as "vibrant" as with Tidal. Spotify library is definitely superior to Tidal and I like the interface better. The Browse/Discover function from Spotify is a great way to discover new music. BTW for all the Tidal fans, it was interesting to me to see that not all Tidal streamed music is uncompressed. While much (most?) of it is (as witnessed by the Aries Mini/DS Lightning file data display) I do notice the occasional AAC file; e.g., Joe Bonamassa's "Blues Deluxe". Still sounds very very good.
@ghosthouse Knew it was not just me, remember a thread on it last year. And same symptoms , late at night, never during the day. Hopefully the new modem will help but going to check Spotify out as well, like to keep my options open....
@uberwaltz, Congratulations. You are making good progress. After AT&T installs the new modem, please ask them to run a speed test to confirm your speed is 75mbps. They should also confirm the cable signal strength is in the correct range. Please ask them to check your cable from from the wall to your modem and also your cable box outside. My Technician replaced the ends of my cable and rewired my inside wall box.
The speed and the cable signal test confirm the down stream components are working to specifications. My signal strength was out of the acceptable range and my neighborhood also had downstream components that were not up to spec. I suggest you ask the AT&T Technician to check everything else (this is what I did). The cable junction box near the street was corroded and was replaced. My cable work required an inside Technician and an outside Technician to complete this work.
I forgot something above. I suggest you re-boot your cable box and router around once per month. Unplug these devices for two minutes and re-start. It seems, that over time, these units need to be cleaned out.
And, after about one week, run the speed test again to confirm your service is 75mbps. Please keep us posted.
It all depends on what device is used for streaming. Even with the higher speed, buffering can still be in play. I get 100Mb/s on average and sometimes even up to 200 Mb/s and sometimes get the hiccups when I use my real old windows laptop. Never any issues with Bluesound Node 2 or using my wife’s MacBook Air laptop. In fact, the best performance I get, both sound quality as well as delivery, is playing Masters with the MacBook going through my (non-MQA) DAC.
I am using deezer and really enjoy it. No drop outs or buffering. I use it via the bluesound node 2 and it works and sounds great. I listen to a very wide range of music styles and there is nothing I haven’t found on it.
“The node 2 offers both wireless and wired connection for internet I believe.”
Yes it does have an Ethernet port but that just replaces the wireless “connection“ between your router and the Node2. You still need to consider the connection between device used as the source for streaming. I’m referring to the scenario where streaming is done using a laptop not through a dedicated streamer.
Does the node 2 not stream itself like the vault 2 does? All the vault needs is its hard wired connection and that's it. I have never examined the node 2 carefully tbh
Are you in the USA? What service level are you using? Premium or HiFi? What is the sq like? It sounds similar layout to Tidal, depending on the sq it might be worth a trial
I have had Napster (used to be Rhapsody) and Pandora Premium (higher quality and no commercials) for years. Napster provides music on demand and Pandora provides decent playlists. In addition, I use them in the car.
I was having problems with Tidal on gigabit service (verified to hundreds of Mbps to multiple testing destinations). I read about issues of ISP’s DNS services interfering with Tidal, and recommending switching to OpenDNS or Google DNS. I put Google on my router and my issues went away. Went back to default and problems returned. A year went by and I upgraded my router and left DNS at the default ISP offering and the problems had gone away. Perhaps the ISP changed behavior or Tidal changed algorithms.
You don’t need much BW for Tidal. But just because you have sufficient BW to your location doesn’t mean there isn’t congestion or throttling elsewhere. Or that some DNS games are not interfering (I know it sounds like superstition).
uberwaltz, Node2 does stream and supports both WiFi and hardwire Ethernet connectivity. The original question/concern was about Tidal dropouts and my comment was that even with a good/fast broadband speed, the likelihood of dropouts can still vary depending on what device does the streaming, e.g., Node2, windows laptop, MacBook, etc.
The AT&T tech found that the issue was not truly just the modem as that addition only brought speeds up marginally to about 28mbps. So he went on a mission ( great tech), checked my line box on my house, no problem there, went back to the street box, no problem there, then back to the main area distribution hub which was only 1000ft away and there he found the issues. He was working on that for over 2 hours not sure exactly what he did but he did say signal strength was now up considerably. After his work a new speed check revealed 81mbps.and all seems to be well so far.
Well last night went well Wife watching Netflix in HD Daughter watching Netflix in HD a different stream Myself listening to Tidal masters albums No dropout anywhere anytime Fingers crossed....
@uberwaltz, Congratulations. It is great news that you have all the above Internet activity going on and there were no signal drops, or related performance issues.
It is very interesting, to me, that we BOTH had similar ISP Cable issues that were greatly impacting our ISP cable server performance and Tidal Streaming. I had both my outside junction box and downstream amplifier issues and you had your main area distribution hub issues.
I wonder how many other people are having similar Internet cable issues impacting Tidal like we did. Streaming audio from Tidal is simple since you just push a button BUT there are several electronic devices behind the scene that might need work AND these issues are not easy to detect. Signal dropouts and out of range cable signal strength are good indications of these issues. When having Tidal Streaming issues, I continue to recommend that the first place to look is your IP Cable Service to include all the above parts mentioned above.
In addition, as I stated above, I suggest you re-boot your cable box (and remove its battery, if needed) and router around once per month. Unplug these devices for two minutes and re-start. It seems, that over time, these units need to be cleaned out.
I tried Tidal, but I listen to a lot of Classical and find it’s interface unusable for that genre. Apple has an easier interface than Spotify, the other service that I have tried, but they both deep catalogs. I’m waiting for Quobuz. I also tried a free month of Primephonic for Classical but it has a very limited catalog
Yea I did try the Spotify free service but sq was noticeably much worse than Tidal but I am on the $20 hifi Tidal subscription so no surprise. Deezer looked like a good alternative, may wait for Quboz and then do a comparo. At least Tidal appears to be streaming fine again for now after incoming line fix to get speed back up.
Like mahler mentioned, classical on Tidal is pretty slim pickens. Though Spotify has lower sound quality, I still find myself using it. Hopefully, Quobuz will offer an alternative. B
Yes I am waiting to see how Quboz turns out here in the USA once they roll it out. Now I have my service sorted Tidal works well enough for me as they do have a goodly selection of rock both new and old.
I have used Napster, Spotify and done a trial of Tidal and Deezer at the premium level. Sound quality for 16/44 was the same for Tidal and Deezer. I like the Deezer interface better and at the time Deezer had many more millions of tracks but now I think they are comparable. I chose Deezer and have been largely satisfied for several years now (maybe not giving my $ to JayZ and that outfit had something to do with it). When I had drop outs I fixed it by re-positioning my Sonos Bridge to reduce router interference. Drop outs are rare but I expect the ones I do get are due to my router being on the other end of the house as the service is bomber at work.. If you log a support case with Deezer it’s a next day response but usually pretty good. Now that the exclusive Sonos (hifi 16/44 Flac) agreement is over you can get FLAC through a web app player now. I just downloaded the beta version and it works pretty nice and you can set your bit rate. Looks like some kind of browser app. I use it at work now all the time. Deezer also announced an agreement in 2017 to support MQA soon.
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