Norwegian streaming service Tidal goes live in the UK today. With a library of over 25 million tracks alongside music videos, editorial articles, features and interviews it hopes to woo the sound quality conscious away from Spotify and its ilk. With Android, iOS and PC/Mac platforms plus support from “all the major labels” it hopes to make an impact on the ‘hi-res’ market opened up by Quboz earlier in the year. It’s pricing matches the £19.99 per month charged by the French company but it looks like the Scandinavian outfit has got more hardware makers onboard at this stage.
Tidal lists an impressive array of brands including Linn, Meridian, McIntosh, Simple Audio, Bluesound, NAD, Denon and Pro-ject, not forgetting the rather popular Sonos platform. The quality of stream being offered is 16/44.1 (1411kbps) FLAC/ALAC which also matches Quboz, so it will be interesting to see which of these is on top in a years time, or for that matter whether enough people are prepared to spend twice the price of Spotify for over four times the bit rate.
www.tidalhifi.com
Jason Kennedy