Tidal


I am new to the computer streaming concept. I am interested in anyone who has experience with Tidal. Please educate me as to what equipment I need from my PC to my Preamp. Thanks, Steve
salevick
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.