High bitrate of Tidal worth it?

[Wagz3]

I recently paid for the full premium Tidal streaming music service. I did this to get the best audio quality with their lossless HiFi bitrate. I'm thinking I may not even be getting the benefits of the higher bitrate because of the hardware and how I'm using it. I am using it on my S9 plus but exclusively using it with bluetooth. Bluetooth into my car stereo and bluetooth into my Anker Liberty Air earbuds. The earbuds only support basic codec as well.

My question is am I receiving any benefit from the HiFi bitrate ($19.99!) since I'm only using it with bluetooth with car/earbuds. Would say youtube audio give me the same sound ($9.99)

Thanks

 

[Rukbat]

Most likely not. First, your internet path from their server might not be fast enough to receive every packet error free at a high enough speed. (That's why internet speeds are sold as "up to" - the ISP can control the speed from them to you, but not from the server to them. If your path is limited to 1mbps, you're only going to get 1mbps from that server, no matter how fast the server is capable of sending data out.)

Car audio - if you have a good head unit, capable of sub-bass to 20KHz, and speakers to match, that may work, but earbuds don't go down that low and usually don't go up that high.

If you really want full fidelity, you want unencoded audio, which means analog, and you want copper for the entire path, no wireless, WiFi, Bluetooth or anything else that degrades the quality (and even the best codex will - you'd need a bitrate of of at least 200kbps to give you decent audio (that's only 10 samples per second at the high end - more like 20mbps sampling to get close to analog [which, not being sampled, has an effective infinite sampling rate]). Unless you can hear 20kHz with no loss over your 1kHz hearing, I wouldn't bother. (When I was younger, that went to 22kHz for me - even live music sounded a bit muddy if it was coming through someone who was standing up in front of me when I was sitting - I could hear where their body was. [Today I don't bother - my hearing got blown out by a sudden loud blast right by me, so anything above 4kHz doesn't exist for me. And that's a good warning for anyone using any kind of earphone - wired or wireless - if the phone manufacturer limits the maximum audio through earphones, don't try to defeat it. Living with 4kHz ringing in your ears 24/7 isn't fun. Just one short super-loud blast can do it.])

 

[Mike Dee]

I recently paid for the full premium Tidal streaming music service. I did this to get the best audio quality with their lossless HiFi bitrate. I'm thinking I may not even be getting the benefits of the higher bitrate because of the hardware and how I'm using it. I am using it on my S9 plus but exclusively using it with bluetooth. Bluetooth into my car stereo and bluetooth into my Anker Liberty Air earbuds. The earbuds only support basic codec as well.

My question is am I receiving any benefit from the HiFi bitrate ($19.99!) since I'm only using it with bluetooth with car/earbuds. Would say youtube audio give me the same sound ($9.99)

Thanks

You'll start out with pure sound and it will degrade downward from there. It's better than starting out with lousy audio but you won't reap all the benefits. The only bluetooth protocol that comes close to wired is Sony's LDAC but it's not available on all their headsets.