Hi-res music streaming services compared: which should you subscribe to?
Tidal, Qobuz, Amazon Music and Apple Music all offer hi-res streaming tiers, but which deserves your monthly fee?
The battle to become the best music streaming service when it comes to 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.
Today, the key to victory is ad-free, hardware-supported streaming in high-resolution audio quality – and, crucially, for the best price.
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 'only' offers CD quality, and the delay of Spotify HiFi leaves the world's most popular streaming service with some of the poorest-sounding streams)?
First things first, should you care about hi-res streaming? High-resolution (often shortened to 'hi-res') audio is a term used to describe music files that have a higher sampling frequency and/or bit depth than that of CD quality, which is specified at 16-bit/44.1kHz.
So a hi-res file can be 24-bit/44.1kHz, where bit-depth is higher than CD quality but the sampling rate is the same, and vice versa.
The highest quality MP3 has a bitrate of 320kbps. A 24-bit/192kHz file takes that to 9216kbps. Music CDs are 1411kbps – remember, they're your starting marker for hi-res.
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.