Tidal

The best music service for streaming-savvy audiophiles

Tidal has been riding an encouraging wave of momentum in the past five years, since it became the first service to offer hi-res audio streaming thanks to its adoption of MQA technology.

Now Tidal is ditching MQA – but the streaming service does still offer hi-res streaming up to 192kHz via the FLAC format, which is compatible with more music streamers and hi-fi hardware due to its open-source nature.

Of course, Tidal is far from the only hi-res music streaming service today, with Qobuz, Amazon Music and Apple Music also offering better-than-CDquality streams. Spotify HiFi bringing CD quality sometime in the near future will only intensify the competition too. So, is Tidal still number one?

In April 2024, Tidal simplified its subscription tiers to align with the competition, making its hi-res and spatialaudio offerings much more affordable.

While access to 24-bit hi-res streams and Dolby Atmos Music and Sony 360 Audio tracks used to be locked within a £19.99 ‘HiFi Plus’ tier, with CD-quality streaming offered in a £9.99 ‘HiFi’ option, there is now just one individual subscription plan costing £11 per month. This price matches Apple Music and Amazon Music, meaning Tidal is no longer the priciest hi-res streaming service out there.

Tidal’s Family plan, for up to six family members, now costs £17 per month, while the Student Plan, offering the same as the Individual plan, has been discounted by 50 per cent and now costs just £5. Tidal has now also scrapped its free tier, which it introduced in the US in November 2021.

As well as being accessible via its PC and Mac desktop apps, web player (subscribers need Chrome or Firefox for lossless CD-quality sound) and Android and iOS mobile apps, Tidal has also expanded into Apple and Android TV apps as well as Apple CarPlay.