Introduction
I love music.
We have music available all around most of our house. A nice midi hifi system in the dining room. A decent separates system in the music room with all our books and the piano. Quality budget active speakers in my office and a Sonos One in the kitchen diner and Sonos sound bar for the lounge, with the TV.
Most of my music is on Vinyl and CD, but the CD’s have all been ripped to a lossless format at redbook standard. With a collection of old Apple Airport Expresses and Extremes we have networked the various music devices that do not already support streaming.
So using a mix of the Sonos app, and iTunes (now Apple Music App) we can listen to any of our none vinyl music around the house. Its not perfect and I’ll be addressing that in part 2 but for now lets talk about Music Services.
Music Streaming Services
Streaming music services is not something I got into. I like hifi and will admit I was picky; in fact you could call be a hifi snob (as well as a coffee snop), but streaming round the house is convenient and the Sonos and Airplay 2 is something that is not too bad for general listening. Low quality streaming services is not something I was interested in.
The big player in streaming is of course Spotify; but I first tried streaming services thanks to the Sonos Play One I was bought for my birthday. We got it as a solution for music in the kitchen, a small standalone speaker to sit on the windowsill was ideal. When we bought it, it came with the Deezer Streaming service for free for one year.
This was a bit of a wake call. The quality was not bad for general listening, and the convenience was something I loved.
Through it I came to find more music and buy more CD’s and vinyl from artists that the streaming services had helped me discover. The services learn from what you listen too and then suggest other things you might like.
After my Deezer subscription ran out, I looked for other free offers. You generally find that broadband/mobile phone company may have a deal on offer. It was via this I managed to switch to Apple Music, and more recently I have moved to Tidal.
If your into hifi the issue with most streaming services, and most home streaming tech like Apples Airplay is that in general they are a lossy 256 kbps / 320 kbps service. For listening on bluetooth headphones and when out and about using your mobile phone as your music device this is generally fine, but for sitting down at home and actively listening, you want something better.
There are now several companies like Tidal that offer Redbook standard losses or above audio quality and if your equipment supports tech like MQA then you have a hifi streaming solution available to you.
So what streaming services is best. Well that is a difficult question. On quality its Tidal and Qobuz, for price its Spotify. The bigger issue is track availability. Some tracks are only available on some services and some tracks not at all. If you’re interested in classical music most of the main companies are poor and you better off looking at services like Primephonic.
I enjoyed Deezer and Apple Music, but have not yet used Tidal enough to be sure if its better, it is missing some music that Apple have, but the quality with the right hardware is certainly better.
