Tidal Offering Audiophile Quality Music Streaming for $20 a Month

There is a big community out there that really care about their audio performance; I am one of those people. On my desktop I have a dedicated headphone AMP a digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) and a whole range of other audio devices to get the best from my music collection. Streaming from sites such as Spotify and Last.fm is great for convenience, but it’s not really the best way to enjoying music.

A Swedish company named Aspiro has just launched their new service “Tidal”. Tital claims to offer CD quality streaming using the “free lossless audio codec” or FLAC. This is a great format for music in terms of quality, with the downside being that the file sizes are much larger than that of MP3. A typical high-quality MP3 may be 5-8mb in size, but a file FLAC will be more like 40-50MB.

High quality audio is tempting, but with a catalogue of 25 million songs, 70,000 ad-free HD music videos, editorial content and more available there’s certainly lots to enjoy. The site can stream at 44.1kHz 16-bit FLAC and ALAC music files at 1411 kbps; that’s almost four times the bit rate of rival music streaming services.

The service is $20 a month, which is roughly double that of Spotify, but this isn’t for your typical day-to-day listener. This service is for those who strive for that extra quality and acoustic performance from their music collection. It’s also incredible value for money, given that buying two albums from HDTracks per month would easily work out more expensive than streaming HD audio.

Thank you TechSpot for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Tidal.