As a long-term LMS user and Tidal subscriber, I have been streaming Tidal for a while now using first the ickstream plugin and more recently the official tidal plugin (v1.2). I have also been following the development of the spotty plugin with interest and last week decided to give it a first-hand whirl and compare the sound quality to tidal's flac. I do not mean to start a new is it audible or not discussion. This is not a mp3 vs flac test; this is more about the respective performances of the plugins.
With the tidal plugin each song starts life as a 256k CBR as displayed in the "now playing" section. then it checks whether you have a tidal hifi account and the credentials. when the checks are made, the stream changes to VBR flac in a matter of seconds. the sound quality is not bad, but i was always puzzled by on-the-fly transition from 256k CBR to VBR. how does it happen instantaneously and seamlessly each time? i sometimes wondered whether we listened to 256k mp3 transcoded to flac. with the excitement the spotty plugin created in the forums, i finally opened spotify premium account, installed the plugin, entered the credentials, checked the relevant options and started listening. i consider myself an audiophile and have a fairly high resolution system around the raidho d series speakers. i was able to transfer all my playlists from tidal to spotify with the help of the excellent soundizz app. one needs to enter her username and passward in the soundizz wep page which might irk some but i went ahead anyways. everything went smoothly and i transferred all my playlists to spotify. in all instances but one whatever song i had on tidal was also available in spotify. i think spotify is slightly better with its data base of songs especially with obscure or local music but i did not consider it a differentiator with my musical taste (modern jazz, rock and some classical). over a listening period of 1 week, i consistently preferred spotify through the spotty plugin over tidal through the tidal plugin. once again, this is not a mp3 vs flac or spotify vs tidal comparison. (in my experience, flac is the clear and audible winner. even when they are similar, flac has the psychological advantage for me). spotty sounded fuller with deeper bass and with better placement of instruments. i kept returning to spotty and now consider it an indispensable plugin. there is continuous development, frequent updates and an active community of participants. i urge everyone with tidal account to to test spotty and see if the findings are similar. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mcduman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=66702 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=110076 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
