Tidal's sound quality (potential watermark audibility)

Hey friends!
I was wondering if some of you are using Tidal and - if yes - if you, like me, noticed some artifacts in most of the songs.

I can basically hear some sort of wow-flutter / warbling as an echo/reverb. It's there in most songs with cymbals and on acoustic guitars. Or in general, recordings which let you hear the acoustic space (read: not hard rock).

For instance, in Dire Straits - The Man's Too Strong (tidal.com/track/1112266), there's this kind of warbling / weird echo around the acoustic guitar. At first, I didn't really pay attention (I use Tidal at work) and thought it was in the recording.
But I just listened to a track I'm very familiar with - The Rolling Stones - Moonlight Mile (tidal.com/track/3043991) - which exhibit the same warbling echo in the background. It's very obvious with the PS UltraLink II.

I'm wondering if it's a watermark, or if Tidal is stream AAC 96 instead of FLAC (it is set to FLAC).

Could someone check it out?

 

Tidal will lower the quality if you have a bad connection, kind of like how YouTube will lower your video quality if you have a bad connection. When this happens the word HiFi will turn gray, if it's white it should be playing in Flac.

Could be the case.

 

Under the username? Looks white to me.

 

If your on desktop it should be next to the volume control to the bottom right hand side. On mobile it will be next to the song time bar thing at the bottom of the screen to the right.

 

I've noticed a similar effect with Tidal. Web streaming (of any type) seems lower fidelity for some reason.

 

Right. It's white.

Maybe these recordings aren't FLAC? That'd be surprising and to get this kind of artifact from AAC would require using a very low bitrate.

Who knows...

 

I always felt TIDAL sounded worse than FLAC files on my machine and essentially indistinguishable from Google Music.

I don't subscribe to TIDAL anymore.

 

I had a three month subscription for free to TIDAL, but I did not renew it, since even on a very fast home Internet connection, equivalent songs I had in FLAC vs. TIDAL version, the TIDAL sounded subtly but noticeably (subjective comparison) worse. Not much difference between TIDAL, Spotify and Groove by Microsoft to my ears.

 

Hello friends. Sorry to re open this thread. I'm too finding tidal music different from the original. Its kind of a distortion in all music, i think... all of them!
maybe its some kind of mark to prevent piracy? i dont know if someone could do such think in streaming, but to me there is no logic to stream a distorted music and advertise that you have HIFI tracks. What do you think?

 

"Watermark", in the sense that it'll allow them to realise when someone rips music from their site? I... have some trouble seeing how that might be the case; even if that was the reason their music sounds a bit off (going by the comments here anyway— I'm more familiar with Spotify), I rather doubt they'll be able to enforce it in any meaningful way.

It also sounds rather counter-intuitive. If their versions of songs are audibly inferior and nearly indistinguishable from Spotify, Google Music et al, then that straight-up defeats the purpose of the service.

 

Its allready proven that there is watermarking by certain labels on all streaming services. Tidal included. I believe the article was posted on computer audiophile.

 

Universal (UMG), the largest music conglomerate worldwide, and all its subsidiaries apparently watermarks all its streamed music in a noticeable way within the fundamentals region. This mark modulates the energy between 1Khz and 3.6KHz region at 0.04s intervals. It is heard as an annoying tremolo within the music that repeats itself throughout the piece....

https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark

Talk about music companies being more in love with their money than music.

 

Holy shit... I didn’t realized the matter was in this level of stupidity. Kind of depressed right now

 

When something is too good to be true kind of way, i.e. free or quasi free music streaming, there has to be a catch.
Mind you Universal Music Group owns a vast array of music labels that range across all spectrum of genres...https://www.universalmusic.com/labels/
I love classical music, so anything by Deutsche Grammophon, EMI and Decca goes out of the window. At least I don't rely on streaming services at all.

Personally there are two aspects of music that are crucial - tonality and microdynamics. Microdynamics contain the soul of the music that is easily lost with many midfi systems. It is the subtle gradations in volume containing those subtle string tremolos, those vocal nuances, those room resonances or pianissimo passages in classical. As much as I love my Andro-ZX2 for its excellent tonality for example, the microdynamics do take a hit compared to my speaker / headphone setup. However at least it is a linear hit whereby it is just more subdued.

In this case, the microdynamics are fucked! I mean this messes with the music in the most horrid way possible. Who cares about having lossless tracks on Tidal when the music is not true to its original sound?!

You could take the Audio watermark test ....
http://mattmontag.com/audio-listening-test/

There are also many discussions on other forums about this over these past few years such as Steve Hoffman

There are even test tracks on Tidal: https://listen.tidal.com/playlist/a26b6652-6eb4-4519-bb7c-ca395da27e0e

or Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/ivionday/playlist/3ZbRKMGb8nqXqZziwtC5ZY

This is as stupid as mastering radio-friendly pieces by engineers at the wrong side of the volume war. This watermarking especially affects us who invest so much in audio equipment and ear training to bring the music in a more realistic way to our ears.

Money talks and consumers pay the price.

 

Thank you for those links, that explains a lot.
I posted in Classical Snobs http://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?posts/184319/ two albums I listened on Tidal. The watermark is very audible in first movement of Schubert "Trout" on the DG album. I attributed it to network transmission etc but after listening number of times I realized it was exactly in the same place, it meant to me that Tidal is f'ing up my music. And indeed.
Looking further there is an interesting discussion about MQA and watermarking in many places and, what a coincidence, Michael Lavorgna reported in Feb 2017 http://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?posts/184319/ that UMG is MQA encoding their library for downloads.
Here is the most interesting link https://www.computeraudiophile.com/...arking-and-mqa/?do=findComment&comment=755352 with some tracks from Tidal where a watermark is audible, and disappears in the MQA version. I would like some younger ears than mine to verify that. But that indeed would explain why the MQA files sometimes may sound "better".

 

@Muse Wanderer do you know any reliable source that I can buy FLAC tracks without this audio watermark? HDTRACKS is reliable?

 

Probably the safest option is to AVOID Universal Music Group recordings altogether. Just boycott them. That said, they control a quarter of all music on the planet!
(To make things worse - Sony also seem to be a culprit with their own version.)

I would certainly avoid UMG's digital music for critical listening or to compare hifi equipment. CDs and vinyl route makes more sense in this regard.

It looks like UMG has probably watermarked both downloads and streaming files from all streaming and music stores including iTunes, Amazon, Tidal and Spotify etc (Matt Montag who wrote the original blog is an engineer with Spotify). This particular version has been developed in 2011. The flutter distorsion seems to be different from differet sources - makes sense as the original source can then be easily identified.

There are reports that show that music from a third party is obviously watermarked but the music purchased directly from Universal is not. Furthermore, there are anecdotes whereby the same recording had a watermark on the PCM but not on the DSD version. Surprise, surprise - the DSD version sounded better! As @wormcycle pointed out, MQA can sound better than non-MQA files simply as a result of the lack of the audible flutter distortion.

The watermarks are at the audible threshold on purpose in order to make it impossible to remove. I can hear it even with my mobile phone speakers - it is certainly audible especially with piano music during soft passages.

Here is some more info:
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,111198.0.html

Now we really need a plug-in of some sort (Jriver, foobar, anything) to easily detect this music fuckery. That way users can ask for a refund and send their complaints to Universal and the music store from where they purchased the music.

Universal Music Group always ready to damage their own goods so that they can identify their origin easily. What a shame!

 

Ha, that was my post (I am RichardSF on the Computer Audiophile forum). The distortion can be very obvious (depends on the music) and doesn't require younger ears to hear it — I am 61. To compare the example tracks, the best way is to login to the Tidal website and play the tracks on the web browser. Open each track in a separate browser tab so that you can quickly switch between them for comparison.

 

II hope I am wrong but I am afraid that the industry decided that it is safe to write off this segment of the market. Between watermarking and MQA there may be not much room. They want to control the whole chain from the source material to playback, the distortion of the source in the process does not really matter, as long as we do not have any other choice. The link below paints a pretty dark picture, especially considering that UMG is MQA encoding their library...

http://fairhedon.com/2017/11/05/an-interview-with-mastering-engineer-brian-lucey/

 

Ouch, but so true that audiophiles are weak.

MQA has been targeting the weakest players in our world, the audiophiles. And they’re targeting those most dependent on pimping new tech, the audiophile press.​

I also hope he will comment on audible watermarking, which ruins his work as a mastering engineer. However, it would put him in an awkward position because the recording labels are his clients.