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The battle to become the best music streaming service offering hi-res streams is well and truly underway. Gone are the days when all a streaming platform had to do was offer up low-quality Ogg Vorbis or MP3 streams and make you endure a few ads for the privilege. In , the key to victory is ad-free, unlimited streaming in high-resolution quality — and, crucially, for the best price.
Tidal is perhaps the most established in this realm. It is our favourite service, too, and holder of a What Hi-Fi? Award in the music streaming service category. So, is Tidal HiFi Plus the answer? It's certainly one answer, but there are other options There's also Amazon, which announced in May that its hi-res-inclusive Music HD tier which we called "up there with the best" was now free for all Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers.
So where does the arrival of these newer, competitively priced hi-res services leave Tidal and Qobuz, and even services not in the hi-res game Deezer, for example, 'only' offers CD quality? How will they convince customers to stick around for hi-res audio at comparatively hiked prices next to the likes of Apple and Amazon?
Below, we try to help you decide just that, starting with the differences between lossless and hi-res music, and offering a breakdown of the services and their USPs. Get ready: your music is about to sound a lot better. First things first, should you care about hi-res streaming?
So what do the numbers mean? It might help to think of an audio signal as a sound wave being plotted on a graph. Sampling rate — the second number — refers to the number of times per second that the wave is measured during the analogue-to-digital conversion process.
The higher the sampling rate, the more times the audio signal has been sampled, and thus the more detail resolution you get. The first number is bit-depth, which indicates the number of 'bits' of information present in each sample of the signal. Going from 16 bits to 24 bits results in a massive increase of dynamic range, which is the gap between the quietest and loudest sounds that can be captured.
In numbers, it's a jump from 96dB to dB, which is huge. Streams from Spotify and Apple Music use compressed file formats with relatively low bitrates, such as kbps Ogg Vorbis streams on Spotify Premium if you're a Spotify Free user, your file quality will actually max out at kbps and kbps AAC files on Apple Music.
This 'lossy' compression means that certain data is scrapped in the encoding process for the sake of convenience and smaller file sizes. Obviously, this affects the sound quality. To illustrate why hi-res should sound better than, say, an MP3, we need simply to compare the relative bitrates the amount of information being transferred measured in kilobits per second. The highest quality MP3 has a bitrate of kbps. Music CDs are kbps — remember, they're your starting marker for hi-res.
Provided your system is transparent enough, playing hi-res music can bring you more detail and texture, thus bringing you closer to what the artist wanted to say when they recorded their work. And isn't that what we want? Although hi-res audio songs and albums have been available to download for several years now, streaming hi-res audio is relatively new across popular music subscription platforms — and some still don't offer it.
While the terms 'lossless' and 'hi-res' may be used in close connection — Apple Music has launched Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless labels and, to complicate matters further, Amazon Music prefers the terms HD and UHD when referring to its more premium audio offerings — music that is 'lossless' is not always hi-res. Here's the thing: where hi-res audio is defined as music that has a resolution higher than CD quality, lossless audio has no set specification in terms of bitrate.
If no compression algorithm or codec has been used to compress the audio within your particular file, two things happen: lossless though not necessarily hi-res sound quality, and pretty soon a storage warning on your device.
They can both store CD-quality or high-resolution audio files. The drawback? These audio files are big. Now, let's introduce FLAC. So far, we've talked about uncompressed lossless files and compressed lossless files. Now, we'll talk compressed lossy files.
This is where our old friend the MP3 comes in — a file format that compresses a file and reduces its size by discarding data that cannot be retrieved again. Here's an explainer on each service, the tech they use to deliver hi-res, what you'll need to play it, and, crucially, for whom each service will likely suit best.
Tidal has been riding the hi-res wave since when it began offering hi-res audio streaming thanks to the adoption of MQA technology. But not all of these support hi-res playback of Tidal's Masters. Masters are now available via both Android, iOS and desktop apps, and hi-fi components and platforms that support MQA. Tidal Connect — a similar concept to Spotify Connect — also allows for easy streaming to compatible products from within the native Tidal app, and it's able to cast Tidal Masters too.
Now for the hi-res small print: playing Tidal Masters through the Tidal desktop app on a computer, via its 3. The only way to entirely unpackage an MQA file for playback and therefore give you the best representation of the file data is by pairing your computer or Apple or Android device with an MQA-compatible DAC, taking the decoding process away from the software Tidal app.
Tidal also offers a growing catalogue of immersive audio tracks via its support of Dolby Atmos Music and Sony Reality Audio. Tidal HiFi subscribers need to connect their Atmos-enabled device to a compatible streamer running the most recently updated Tidal app. Whichever way you approach it, Amazon has gone super aggressive on pricing. You can access Amazon Music HD through three different avenues: a web browser, the desktop app, or through the Android and iOS mobile apps.
We need another hi-res terminology discussion, though. Amazon has decided to refer to and label hi-res music as 'Ultra HD'. Presumably it feels that this labelling will prove clearer for a mass audience. And perhaps it's right. Anyway, the files you'll get are actually FLACs.
Qobuz is the first streaming giant to have dropped MP3 streaming entirely, going all-in on CD-quality and hi-res streaming. In truth, taking a stand is nothing new to Qobuz, a company that tends to do things differently from most of its rivals in the music streaming world.
The French service has been around since the same amount of time as Spotify but it left its home borders only in , when it became the first CD-quality streaming service to hit the UK. Tidal joined the ranks a couple of years later.
Qobuz was also the first to offer hi-res streams. Qobuz is now available on lots of devices. There's a web player as well as desktop Mac and PC and mobile iOS and Android apps, plus integration into a wide range of hi-fi products. Google Chromecast is a big deal here, as it means adding Qobuz to an existing 'dumb' hi-fi is as simple and affordable as adding a Chromecast dongle, and many hi-fi companies are now adding Chromecast support into their streaming components, thereby increasing Qobuz's availability.
Broadly speaking, most devices that support Tidal also support Qobuz and vice versa, and both services are available only in CD-quality via some streamers. A major feather in Qobuz's cap, however, is that it is the first service to make bit hi-res streaming available on Sonos products. Given how long we've waited for our favourite multi-room family to adopt hi-res, it's quite a big deal.
Qobuz's comparatively high price has always been partly justified by its exhaustive library of hi-res music. Recent figures state Qobuz now has over , hi-res quality albums, while Tidal claims 'only' more than 1m tracks. Numbers rarely tell the whole story, but we regularly find hi-res albums on Qobuz that are available in only CD-quality on Tidal.
On the flip side, however, we often find albums on Tidal , Spotify , Apple Music and Deezer that aren't available on Qobuz at all — which we would argue is a far bigger issue And the best bit? That puts it on a par with Amazon, and much cheaper than Tidal and Qobuz. At launch, the company claimed that 20 million tracks were accessible in the highest quality Hi-Res Lossless format, with the whole catalogue following by the end of Having heard Apple's Hi-Res Lossless catalogue, we can tell you that there's plenty to get excited about — unless you just bought a new pair of AirPods.
None of them. We don't blame you. Check out our guide for how to listen to hi-res audio on an iPhone. Like Amazon and Tidal, Apple Music also now has immersive audio tracks — this time through Apple's proprietary Dolby Atmos-powered Spatial Audio format, designed to provide "multidimensional sound and clarity"; to deliver surround sound and 3D audio via your headphones. The HomePod also supports Spatial Audio, so you can fill your room with virtual 3D sound from a single device.
Another short answer: Deezer, Spotify and YouTube Music are yet to offer or even promise to offer hi-res audio. We know that Spotify is set to launch its long-awaited and seemingly delayed 'HiFi' tier which was promised by the end of but never materialised at some point, but it remains to be seen whether hi-res will be on the menu at launch or whether it will stick to CD quality — and if it will try to undercut the competition.
So will Deezer which offers CD-quality or YouTube Music which maxes out at kbps within its paid-for tier ever go hi-res? Alexander Holland, chief content and strategy officer at Deezer, offered some choice words on this last year: "Our goal is to make sure that Deezer brings value to both artists and music fans.
We would never want to stand in the way of that. Ultimately, the delicate balance of budget and device compatibility within your home will determine which service you opt for. Tidal is our current Award winner: it sounds that little bit better than the competition, the user experience is spot on, the catalogue extensive, and the accessibility of hi-res Masters streams on MQA-supporting devices is only growing. That said, it has yet to react to the latest price war on hi-res streams, bar setting up a free, ad-supported and lesser-quality tier in the US.
Qobuz is now a good shout for Sonos users looking to bring hi-res audio to their homes and it does have the biggest hi-res catalogue.
Admirably, it offers users the chance to purchase and download music at a discount for Studio Sublime members , although we'd note the significant holes in its standard CD-quality album offering. Amazon Music HD has recently positioned itself as one of the cheapest hi-res options, and could well be the service of choice for non-Apple users who want the best sound for the least pound. The downside is that even if you're heavily ensconced in Apple's ecosystem, you'll still need to invest in third-party products to enjoy lossless and hi-res at their fullest.
Got the service? Now read how to choose the right speakers and get the best sound. Still waiting for Spotify HiFi? Sorry, but Spotify's CEO doesn't know when its hi-res streaming tier will launch.
Further reading and if you're struggling to hear the difference the problem with hi-res audio is how you might be listening to it. Becky has been a full-time staff writer at What Hi-Fi?
Prior to gaining her MA in Journalism in , she freelanced as an arts critic alongside a year career as a professional dancer and aerialist — any love of dance is of course tethered to a love of music.
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