Just FYI: Tidal is consolidating their HiFi and HiFi Plus tiers


Tidal took away the cheaper yearly subscription I had bought through Best Buy, which really made me mad, but they are doing this soon (see below) to better compete in the marketplace with Amazon, Qobuz, and Apple.

TIDAL

"Starting April 10, 2024, you will now get access to our music library in full lossless, HiRes FLAC, and Dolby Atmos sound for the same price you pay today of $10.99 (plus applicable sales tax)/month.

This is because we’re making it easier for everyone to enjoy best-in-class sound quality by combining our HiFi and HiFi Plus tiers into a single subscription tier called TIDAL.

You will see these changes reflected on your Subscription page on your first billing date on or after April 10, 2024. Thanks for choosing to be a TIDAL subscriber."

Is anyone here a fan of Dolby Atmos mixes? Other than Steven Wilson, who else does them well?

moonwatcher

I find it ironic that they refer to themselves as best in class after they fell for MQA.

@overthemoon curious. What are you looking for with another streaming service that you feel Tidal isn't providing?  I want to try Deezer and Qobuz for the heck of it but wish they both had "Connect" apps to make using them easier. I heard Qobuz was going to have one soon. Then hopefully the hardware can have a firmware update to integrate it. 

I do like the fact that Deezer pays a user centric division of your monthly subscription to the artists that you actually listen to and not just a check to the labels for them to divvy as they see fit.  I listen to some eclectic stuff and it'd be nice to know my $$ is going to support those artists and not mostly Adele. 

@fuzztone I know. MQA might have been a useful thing for maybe about three years when most of the country was stuck with DSL speeds, but not now. Simply no need for any lossy compression schemes anymore with FLAC 24-bit/192KHz possible (if the labels provide such files to the streaming services). 

I figure Tidal jumped on the MQA bandwagon early to differentiate themselves from Apple and Amazon, whether most audiophiles understood it or not. 

I still wish you could buy a yearly subscription at a discount though. 

What about those of us who anted up for a lifetime subscription a few years ago?  How will these new changes effect us?  

@moonwatcher thanks for the update.  I was very unhappy with how Tidal dropped the Best  Buy program without notification or automatic refunds for the remaining months that were prepaid. To find out your Tidal membership has been dropped after thinking its a connection issues having to spend time trying to fix it, then calling Tidal (thats a joy) to find out they are not aware of any issues, open ticket for 2 days, find out program is cancelled, refund is handled by Best Buy, Best Buy unaware, open another ticket at Best Buy, several days latter follow up, eventually get a prorated refund less than the monthly fee remaining . Who cares at this point🤬 …Done!  I do miss Tidal content and features. SQ vs Qobuz in Roon the same here.  Will have to grit my teeth and add Tidal at some point…

@tksteingraber I was fortunate I saw an email from them a few months before my account was going to be cancelled unless I "signed up" for their monthly plan - and notified Best Buy I wanted a refund.

They went about it wrong. If they wanted to kill the idea of a yearly subscription it would have made customer service look far better had they honored the financial agreement you had made with them, until your subscription was up, and THEN told you to move to a monthly subscription model.

I know they got away with it legally probably due to the fine print, but shouldn’t payment up front have constituted a legally binding agreement with them to provide services for that year? I would have thought so, but I’m not a lawyer.

I was mad enough to *almost* cancel them, but I had jumped through several hoops with a 3rd party software to transfer all my old Spotify album favorites and playlists over to Tidal and didn’t want that hassle all over again.