Apple Music vs Tidal for SQ


I compared Tidal to Apple music for the first time using speakers, not headphones. Apple seems bright and a bit less smooth the tidal on my system. I never tried the apple codec before but so far not a fan, it seems to have treble that is a bit fatiguing. What is your experience?

kota1

So got my new Sony Signature dac/pre/headphone amp unboxed and hooked up today. It sounded amazing right out of the box and has a ton of filters. I found the the DSD remastering was best for my taste. So I hook up my Onkyo DP-X1 DAP which has a USB out that I haven’t used, use it more with headphones. Worked great. It also has a feature to upmix files to DSD but only with ripped files, not streaming. The Sony DSD remastering works with everything. The good news is I can listen to everything I can rip in DSD after going through this conversion process. The bad news is now streaming, while still good, will be less satisfying than playing ripped tracks. I can purchase CD quality downloads, replay at the remastered DSD format. Thank you Sony and Onkyo! Marantz also has a DSD remastering feature on their higher end SACD players. I never gravitated to DSD much because a lot of the music I like isn’t available and what is starts at $25 a pop and goes up from there.

https://www.themasterswitch.com/review-sony-ta-zh1es

I haven’t listened to Tidal in years.  I switched from Qobuz to Apple for various reasons and while I give Qobuz a slight edge in sonics I found Apple to be a lot closer than I had anticipated 

Unfortunately we don’t have proper reference Apple Music capable streamer yet to fairly compare Tidal or other streaming services to Apple Music.

Not being impressed by MQA, I've had a "CD-quality" plan from Tidal. I was under the impression that Qobuz was double the $9.95/month I was paying for Tidal, but thanks to @fuzztone I learned that Qobuz is closer to $11/month. Wanting higher quality music, I subscribed to Qobuz this week and was quite impressed. Qobuz's CD-quality content was similar to Tidal's but on many tracks more detail could be heard. The Hi-Rez content was mostly much higher quality... to the point that it inspired a stupid-late 3 hour listening session... exploring familiar favorites to hear the improvement. 

The free Soundiiz online transfer utility worked flawlessly...importing my thousands of tracks, playlists and albums.

Overall it's been a great experience. 

I subscribed to Tidal and Qobuz and appreciate their sound quality. While both are great, I find Qobuz to be more natural and smoother, making it the preferred option for my system. Despite this, even Apple Music and MP3 files sound pretty good on my setup. At the moment, I am utilizing Amazon HD for my music streaming needs, but I have intentions of exploring Tidal in the upcoming year. Although Qobuz sounds better to me, Tidal has a more extensive selection of music that aligns with my personal preferences.