Tidal

At a minimum you will need a DAC- Digital to audio converter, with appropriate cabling. If your PC is too far from your pre to use a physical cable, you will need either an ethernet or wireless connection from the PC to the DAC, with the DAC located close to the PC. As I said, this is the minimum. The web player at tidal right now only works in lossless "mode" using the Chrome browser. If you don't want to run Chrome, then you will need other player software like Jriver, or Foobar, or MedaiMonkey. If you have lots of other processes running on your PC at the same time, you will get occasional drop-outs. When I am on my home office PC w 80 or so processes running, I get a brief (<1 sec) drop out every 5 minutes or so. No big deal.

From there you can go crazy. Network players, Asynchronous USB DACs, , USB to SPDIF converters, etc, etc. Computeraudipohile.com has lots of information on streaming audio in general and the tidal site has plenty as well.

Depending on how your PC is setup, you could just run a cable from the PC's headphone jack (3.5mm stereo) to separate right and left RCA jacks and into any input on the preamp except the phono input. Here is such a cable.

Or, if your PC has a sound card installed just a regular RCA cable.

The highest sound quality will come from some type of a music streamer, (Sonos, Auralic Aries, etc.) out to a DAC.

Mofi is right, of course, but you'd probably find the SQ to be less than satisfactory. No matter how you work it, just remember to keep the volume maxed out on your computer/software and attenuate the signal w your regular pre.

I used the Halide HD DAC, which has attached cables, to try Tidal on my office system. I liked it very much and just received a Sonos to connect to DAC in main system. I am not a computer person, but both were very easy to do.

I am not sure about others here but my personal experience with Tidal has not been satisfactory. I get drop-outs in the early part of a track and then the track would just stop altogether. I simply gave up. I don't think it's an issue with my home broadband as I can listen to Spotify with no drop-outs.

2020, You should get your Broadband checked, at my home I have almost zero issues with dropouts, listening to Tidal while writing this. At my office I have no issues on weekends and evenings but during the daytime its impossible to listen because of dropouts, I can speculate that its because of heavy data flow in our office building.

I think that the reason you have better luck with Spotify it because its not full format requiring less data flow, I'm sure folks more knowledgable on this subject can fill in on this.

Good Listening

Peter

John, Spotify doesn't drop out on your rig because it is a much smaller signal nd is compressed. There is not much there to download. You need throughput for tidal, as it is uncompressed. If you can put the infrasturcture together, tidal BLOWS Spotify off the planet.

Interesting trivia......

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-05-28/why-jay-z-s-tidal-streaming-music-service-has-been-a-disaster

Anyone use a blue sound node 2 or Aires mini? I'm setting up a system in the living room. I have spica angelus speakers a mc2205 or an Accuphase P300. I need a streamer or dac and computer which is what I have in my smaller bedroom for critical listening.
thanks in advance.
brian

If you're not seeking the ultimate in sound quality, I would suggest an Audioengine B1 Bluetooth receiver.  Very simple set-up and the sound quality is pretty good for the money, in my opinion.  To make it even sweeter, mine was purchased under $200. 

Since Tidal launched its Master Quality Audio technology, its business has flourished in recent years. The demand for flawless audio quality is constantly increasing. Here, Tidal comes with MQA music. MQA provides a more natural, believable, engaging and immersive listening experience for our members.

 

I previously wanted to download songs with MQA original quality from Tidal without a subscription and one helped me a lot with Tidal Converter. it's mostly downloading Tidal master quality songs as local files in a common format for transfer to any device for offline playback anytime, anywhere.