Spotify is going Hi-Fi

I’m sure some of you guys remember my TIDAL Master review, where I compared Apple Music, Spotify and TIDAL; where I ultimately conclude that TIDAL has the best sound quality of any streaming service. Although this is still accurate, Spotify has recently announced their introduction to CD-Quality music. How does this stand against the realm of CD-Quality streaming services like TIDAL and Qobuz? Does this change music streaming services? Well... Let's find out!

Competition

Before we can take a look at The future of Spotify’s Hi-Fi service, we must take a look at who else offers such a feature.

TIDAL, Qobuz and Amazon Music HD all offer CD-Quality music, as well as “higher than CD Music quality” which, services like TIDAL and Qobuz rely on this feature as their primary feature for customers. When you search for “Hi-Fi Music”, or anything containing the phrase, TIDAL is the first link that pops up. But what are these services?

TIDAL

First, let’s start with the service that I've previously written about. TIDAL is a streaming service promoted by the likes of Beyonce and Jay-Z. TIDAL focuses on mastering FLAC music files with the MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) format. This means that TIDAL music can be streamed at muuc quality THATS OVER 9000!!

No really! TIDAL music files stream at 9211kbps 16-bit! Spotify premium only streams at 320kbps at maximum, which pales in comparison.

Qobuz

What on earth is Qobuz? I'm glad you asked! Qobuz is a smaller music company from France that also provides users with Hi-Fi music quality. However, Qobuz does this differently than TIDAL. Even though TIDAL uses MQA, Qobuz uses traditional FLAC Hi-Fi audio. This has sparked a rivalry between TIDAL and Qobuz, fans of each. However, even though people say that there is a difference, they both achieve Lossless audio, so it is up to personal preference which One you prefer. However, Qobuz, being a small company, doesn’t have as big of a library as TIDAL or even Spotify.

Spotify Premium

Spotify premium is one of, if not the most subscribed music streaming service (rivaled only by Apple Music) and has delivered music to over 200 million monthly subscribers. However, as previously mentioned, Spotify premium can only achieve 320kbps at the highest quality mp3 file. This means that the audio files are very lossy (loses a lot of information) in the streaming process so therefore, doesn’t sound as good. However, Spotify has one of the biggest music libraries and an amazing algorithm for suggested music and curated playlists, that despite the sound quality, the majority of people would choose Spotify over TIDAL or Qobuz.

Spotify Hi-Fi

And now, the star of the show, the new kid on the block, Spotify Hi-Fi! Not much has been said by Spotify about what can be expected of Spotify Hi-Fi, except that Spotify Hi-Fi will have “CD-Quality audio” and that “Premium subscribers will be able to ‘upgrade’ to Hi-Fi later this year.” High quality audio has been a long asked for feature from subscribers since 2017! And finally, this feature will be added. However, how good is CD-Quality? Well, CD-Quality audio has a bitrate of 1411kbps. One paper, this might not be as high as ‘TIDAL: Master’ but, with a quick test found on google, the majority of people can’t distinguish between the two anyway.

Is Spotify Hi-Fi good?

Okay great! You want to upgrade your service! But should you? Well, the service won’t be released until “later this year” so we won’t know for sure on if it is better than TIDAL or Qobuz, however, for those of you who want high quality audio but love Spotify, then sure go for it! However, when the service is released, I will write a review, and give my final thoughts on the service and which one is better.

thank you for reading and If you have friends that would also be interested, please feel free to like and share! Thank you!