Is Tidal messing up for you? Would you Choose Amazon over it?


For the last month, I’ve been battling with all kinds of issues, from corrupt audio files (primarily noticed in my Tesla, from main stream bands like Metallica etc), to songs buffering, skipping and so on).

Initially, I noticed the corrupt issues which always repeated on the same songs in my car, and I assumed they must have downloaded wrong, then when they came back to play again, were playing off a cached copy on the car that was already corrupt.  I’d get issues with random buffering issues here and there, but once again, thought it was an issue with my car and it being on a cell service.

At home, I stream from a Sonos player and have also had buffering issues, but I’m also having internet connectivity issues here, so I didn’t correlate the problem as a universal problem.  I also constantly had issues with Alexa unable to select a song from Tidal, or skipping to a secondary music service because it couldn’t communicate with Tidal, yet I’d open up the Sonos app and was able to select the Tidal song without a problem, so thought it was once again, an internet issue.

Today, I was having the buffering constantly issues.  I left the house to run some errands.  Same on my car.  Got home, continued problem.  Checked my internet.. 0 packet loss yet same problem.  Stream from my phone, same problem.  Switch music services and works great.  I’ve also had some songs sound distorted (at loud volumes, but it felt like a file problem and not an amplification problem).

Have you all had any issues like this before?  My phone is tmobile, my car is ATT, and my home is cable internet, so 3 entirely different internet sources, same

problem.  I’m considering switching to Amazon’s hifi, but it doesn’t have built in support for my car yet.  How have your experience been, and any of you tried both side by side and found benefits or downfalls to one over the other?

maverick3n1

tidal and qobuz are clearly a cut above spotify, amazon, deezer, etc etc in sound quality in their higher res feeds

the delta between tidal and qobuz is more subtle, there are other recent threads describing the sonic differences

tidal has the mqa issue, but smart users largely ignore this, just enjoy the music... if you have roon, it decodes mqa when it is there... set the setting and you don't need to think about it

both are thoroughly enjoyable and with an excellent system, the source feed is as good as any...

I enjoy Tidal. Any few issues arose, I contacted Tidal Help and they came back promptly. The MQA sound on many albums is superior. Neal

 

@jjss49  darn you.

I really didn't want to believe it but Qobuz is better than AmazonHD.  

Just signed up for the Qobuz free trial and with WASAPI (exclusive) mode it's just  better.  The bass is tighter and there is an increase in clarity which isn't what I wanted to hear as I just renewed the Amazon annual plan.

errrrrr!!!

 

 

Ironically, I contacted Tidal support, pointing out the fact that identical songs played both, through my sonos on my home system with the cable internet, and my car playing, using AT&T cell service to stream, have the same corrupted issues…. Their response.. “Try using a VPN of XYZ”.

So are they implying that America’s streaming service has corrupt files, and I need to VPN to get their service through another country?  I don’t know that it’s even possible to make my Tesla use a VPN, and I haven’t put in a business class router, so I have no way to set a VPN for a specific device, and I’m not passing all of my internet through a free vpn which would basically throttle my internet service.. wtf are they smoking over there?  “What?  We have a file that’s corrupt through two entirely different internet providers?  You should just VPN so you pull from a different server!”… how about you fix your files!