Tidal's sound quality (potential watermark audibility)

...thought I'd pop in since this was mentioned on the Yggdrasil 2 thread.

When I hear it, I find this watermarking to sound like a tremolo or warble. It's so bad on some tracks that if I stop the player when I'm listening (and hearing the warble) my eardums actually seem to continue the warble or flutter for a fraction of a second. An odd sensation. However, on some tracks, I can't discern the watermark. It seems to be very audible on well-recorded piano, massed vocals, and some unamplified instruments (I particularly notice trumpet since I dabble in horn).

I've heard this distortion both on Apple Music and Tidal, so I'd expect it to be in the streamed copy of the file in many places.

The safest thing to do if you are prone to nervosa is to only use Tidal to discover music. But that sort of defeats it's purpose... So perhaps the 2nd safest thing to avoid nervosa is to check each album to see if the label is on this list before playing it (Get Album Info in Tidal).

If it's not on that list, it's probably not watermarked.

I don't know that I can hear watermarking on Sony BMG albums @Muse Wanderer . I'll have to pay attention to that next time I listen to one.

 

Although I don't particularly love wealthy corporations I think people are placing blame in the wrong place. People can justify it as much as they like, but music you don't pay for is stolen. If we don't agree with the way companies and artists have motorized the music distribution, nobody is forcing anybody to listen to music, it is after all a hobby, not a human right. We all insist on being paid for our work so why it is wrong for music producers/distributors to protect their earnings is confusing to me. If there weren't so many people who ripped off music on such a vast scale this technology would never have been invented and implemented. If you want to get mad at somebody, get mad at the millions of people who think paying for music is for suckers. They are the culprits if you ask me.

I remember talking to a group of much younger friends who laughed when they heard that I bought my music. They thought I was simply a sucker when they could steal it as much as they liked with impunity. Now you have audio watermarking so why are you placing blame in the wrong place? Even if you pay for Tidal, that doesn't mean they must give you absolutely the identical experience to full ownership of the music you stream. You are renting a product version of the music. It seems fair to me. Yes, sadly some pieces of music will be disproportionately affected by this protection scheme (again, thank your music stealing friend, sister, brother in law, co-worker etc). Overall, to have extremely wide access to MASSIVE amounts of music I think these small compromises are reasonable.

Ideally there will eventually be software that installs on your system and reads the DRM information and removes the protection while you are using it, but will not allow copying. Not sure if that is possible, but until such time I think people need to accept that this is such a first world problem it is laughable. Millions starve, live in camps after being displaced by war or natural disaster and we are lucky enough that we can be irked by a slight warble in our music streaming services.

 

Not an expert, but my understanding is that’s what bad digital jitter sounds like.

EDIT— I seem to have been wrong on this. See below.

 

I blame Universal. They are just doing everything they can to protect their assets. It still does not stop anyone from stealing or distributing, just makes it easier to track for them, even if it means sacrificing quality. It is not stolen if you pay for Tidal.

That's actually the point of paying for hi-fi. If you pay for hi-fi, you should get hi-fi, not for one that has been tampered with a watermark.

Isn't this already part of MQA?

 

Are we just assuming that if you buy the same music on CD, there won't be a watermark? That's what I always wonder about when this topic comes up.

 

Because they are stealing from me that way: I am paying for lossless music streaming, and they are damaging the product they sold to me using false advertising. I did not pay to listen to a watermarked shit, I am paying to stream music advertised as a hi-fi FLAC copy of the CD,

That does not prevent stealing, that actually encourages it. If you give me the option to pay for hi-fi streaming services that actually deliver CD quality, I would do it. Otherwise I am much better off getting a copy a properly ripped CD from my friend or somewhere else.
That's not about Tidal: I just removed from my library anything from UMG, there are still good classical labels that do not deliberately damage their recordings.

 

Nah, it isn't. The levels of jitter that we normally think about (outside of gross temporal discontinuities) manifest audibly as smearing, or blurry sound. That is because imprecision in the time domain becomes imprecision in the frequency domain- so you get "sideband frequencies" around the original distinct frequencies in the source signal.

You'll hear jitter as blunted transients, and worse instrument separation in busy music especially. Loss of timbre with things like metal and nylon strings and different sorts of percussion often give it away too. It disproportionately affects the higher frequencies (possibly due to the magnitude of the phase noise being a bigger proportion of the fundamental?), so often leads to people complaining of high frequency rolloff when they're not feeding a DAC well.

No, these watermarks are very different, they're an audible "fluttering", at a rate that you can actually hear, a few times a second, as opposed to thousands of times a second that your average jittery signal exhibits.

 

Thanks! I don’t recall where I first learned this (incorrect) information, but a search reveals it’s a common misconception. There must’ve been some misinformation source that many people read long ago—and I also found there are some fierce debates out there about how audible it is anyway.

Thank you again!

 

Hey, glad to be able to help. Just trying to "pay it forward" when I have actual non-guesswork info.

Both are annoyingly audible, by the way. Jitter is especially hard to ignore if you're an even slightly adequate listener, on even quite modest chains. Compare a Modi Multibit on on-board USB/motherboard S/PDIF to a clean low-jitter feed, it's like a different DAC- you get actual steep transients and highs. Only the least attentive/most cloth-eared of listeners would miss that one- you'd hear it for sure.

I sometimes wonder if it's better not to tell people how to hear the watermarks, if they haven't noticed.. it just drives you nuts when you do. It's a bit more subtle, but really hard to unhear.

 

I think that is a sensible philosophy that works well for a lot of audio defects, but maybe especially true for watermarks. There have been many things I’ve enjoyed thoroughly over the years, only to have them crushed by hearing something better. So, you upgrade. But you can’t upgrade the watermarked audio — thus better to stay ignorant.

 

In my case, I just cancelled Tidal with a bit of an exasperated sigh. Pointless paying premium prices for lossless streaming of compromised audio. Maybe I'll take another look at lossy Spotify for less critical listening.

 

Does anyone know if the lossy Tidal files have this watermark?

 

My god you are tiresome. Like a f'ing broken record.

 

If the record label (e.g. UMG) watermarks their recordings, then both lossy and lossless versions are watermarked.

 

Thank you!!

 

I do not agree, @Not Grumpy . What you are suggesting is that people who have paid for their music (Tidal) be penalized because of people that do not. That's not the right answer, IMO; I'd prefer penalizing those that do not pay for their music.

How would you feel if you bought the CD of a performance only to find audible watermarking? I view this as the same thing.

As an aside, the suggestion that because music is not essential for life and therefore should be freely molested or changed to serve the will of a corporation (or, a government? What if music were "cleansed?" This has happened previously in history...) is detestable to me. I do not accept compromise there, just as I do not accept censorship or "cleansing" of literature.

In any case, germane to this thread: I've listened to a few more Sony Classical albums, and I do not hear audible watermarking. Those are probably safe.

UMG on Tidal can be listenable when your brain isn't tired (ears are fresh) and you can filter out the watermarking. Sometimes, it doesn't bother me as much as other times. I chalk that up to ear/brain compensation, or perhaps simply that certain recordings exacerbate the issue more than others. Melody Gardot "Live in Europe" was enjoyable to me yesterday morning. I didn't know who the label was when I put it on (Verve, as it turns out), and a few songs in thought "what's that??" After verifying it was a Decca/Verve/UMG, I went back to listening and enjoyed the album.

Others, such as "Chinese Butterfly" (Gadd/Corea) made me feel like my skin was itching off.

 

@loplop, I hear you, but I tend to be a realist. That is the world that we actually live in, not the world we want to live in. Companies have the right to do what they want within legal limits to make the most money that they can. I didn't say that I liked it, but I accept it. You don't buy the music from Tidal, you have no claim to it, you are simply accessing their service as is. Nothing more, nothing less. People pay the price for the sins of other people all the time, and historically this has always been the case so not sure why music should be any different.

I have been buying my music since the 1980s and yes to answer your question, I wouldn't like it if some of it was adulterated, but who cares what I like? If I don't like it, I can lump it. These companies have been ripped off to the tune (pun intended) of millions and millions of dollars and they fight back as they can. I didn't say I like it, but I understand it nonetheless. Again, I point the finger at all the people who thought they had a right to free music and stole it while I paid for it, they made the mess, not UMG. If the music wasn't being stolen this whole conversation wouldn't have happened. I can guarantee you that if you were a major shareholder in a company and you were losing significant amounts of revenue to this type of theft, you would happily authorize technological protection that might become an effective deterrent. The watermark is there and if one day the laws and enforcement mechanisms align, the companies will have the evidence they need to move against people they feel have stolen their property. Again, I may not like everything about such an environment, but I do understand it and as such I am not going to blame a company for legally doing what they have the right to do.

I am quite certain any streaming service that gets music from UMG also provides watermarked content to their customers, not just Tidal. In the end, like I said, really unimportant stuff we are talking about here, total first world problems.

 

I use Spotify as mainly a way to assess whether or not I want to buy, and I just experienced this firsthand. I was listening to Chick Corea's The Continents, and the warble is super audible on sustained notes. I liked the music enough though, that I bought the CD and the warble is gone. I have kind of mixed feelings with lining UMG's pocketbook, but ultimately the music isn't available from any other label so I had no choice. This seems to be win/win for UMG unless a entity with some clout like Spotify or Tidal (or better yet Google or Amazon) sues. Certainly, there aren't enough audiophiles for a boycott to have any effect.

 

I'm sure this is ancient news but some spotify content is absoultely horrific even on high quality. Try Nine Inch Nails' "Broken" EP, track 3 "Last", if you can tolerate it. There is some kind of underwater pulsating sound to the guitars. I didn't even do a deliberate A/B to pick it up. The song came up on a Spotify generated playlist one day, and I thought "wow this sounds fucked up, let me see if my rips sound his way". Even my AAC sounded nothing like that, needless to say the FLAC or CD.

I've got no idea if this is some kind of watermarking like in the subject of this thread, or if it's just a MP3 that's been recompressed 10 times and passed off as "high quality", but it makes me wonder how many songs I've heard on spotify that were messed up that I had no frame of reference to realize. If it's really a decent 320kbps encoding I should not be hearing the difference, at least not that easily.

 

Fair enough, @NotGrumpy. I happen to disagree, but that's OK.

Back to the thread at hand: I wondered more about this lately, and decided to do some investigation. I listened to three tracks from Tidal:
1. Richter/Vivaldi Recomposed/Track 1: https://tidal.com/track/35111280
2. Melody Gardot/Live in Europe/Track 1: https://tidal.com/track/84123810
3. Corea & Gadd/Chinese Butterfly/Track 1: https://tidal.com/track/83211627

#1 got picked when I was using Roon Radio, and I listened to the entire album. It sounded OK. This is Deutsche Grammophon, a UMG label.
#2 I mentioned above; I listened to the album last weekend, and it sounded OK, although there were a few spots that made me go "hmmn" to the point I looked to see if it was a UMG album. It was (Verve), and I moved on... and enjoyed the album.
#3 I mentioned above made me want to itch my skin off. Concord Jazz, a UMG label.

I wondered if I could see any of the obvious distortion shown on Matt Montag's site, as shown here:



I'm not sure how to directly capture a Tidal stream, so I used a tape loop to record the output after DA conversion. Of course, this is a "lossy" setup (DA, then AD) so it won't be perfect, but it's what I came up with in a pinch. Would love thoughts on how to directly capture the Tidal bits if anyone knows how

I loaded the waveform into Audacity, and used the Spectrogram tool to look at the 0-3000hz portion of the spectra (top of image) and 0-24000hz (bottom of image). I used the default window size--open to suggestions as to tweaks to this methodology! In any case, #1:


Well, I'm not seeing what Matt saw, at least with my capture method.

#2:


Still not seeing anything awry. Those were both "good sounding" recordings to my ear; I wasn't specifically looking for warble or watermarking, I was just trying to listen to music.. But my nervosa did get me on the Gardot, enough to check...
#3:


This was the recording that made me wince when listening. I don't see the obvious watermarking as shown on Matt's site... But I do see a horrible brickwall filter which has made my NOS DAC (Metrum Amethyst) ring like a bell. At least that's what I interpret from the spectragraph (and the freq plot, not shown here).

So, what does this tell me? Well, perhaps the watermarking isn't universal? Certainly my sample size is too small to come to a conclusion other than it doesn't look to me that *all* UMG is watermarked. Perhaps, on occasion, the "I'm crawling out of my skin" feeling is (in my case) not attributed to watermarking, but mastering choices.

I recall hearing the "warble" on Piano piece, I will try to track that down to measure...

Thoughts? Anyone else tried a similar experiment?