Just a testimonial and anectodal evidence. There are real differences between the two offerings, but the audio produced to me is the same. They charge twice what Spotify does so they have to be better right?Īfter a month of side by side comparisons I finally had to admit I couldn't tell the difference at all between the Tidal MQA titles and the 320kbps versions on Spotify. My first few listening sessions were very impressive. My bias heading in (its always good to declare your bias if you know you have one) was to favor the Tidal offering. I ran them side by side for a month, playing the same songs and albums on both offerings. Spotify's premium service is 320kbps and I already have that subscription. Tidal will let you do a free trial of their MQA/HD stuff so I signed up for it. You can then select any JRiver MC zones or any other DLNA output to stream Tidal from BubbleUPnP. If you have an Android tablet or phone, install BubbleUPnP and configure it to login to your Tidal account.

Unless TIDAL themselves are working on a solution like Spotify Connect, where the online music service 'lives' in your streaming device and you control it from the app on your smartphone or tablet. But, I can give my anecdotal experience with Tidal and Spotify's premium offerring. Unfortunately there is no way to stream Tidal direct from JRiver, but you can use JRiver as an end point for Tidal playback. The 'browsability' from a handheld device is not exclusively up to JRiver I guess, but also to the manufacturers of remote apps like JRemote. I will leave the technical details about MQA to folks like BSA who have a pretty firm grasp.

Jriver and tidal