I’m going against my analog nature and experimenting with a hi-fi streaming service called Tidal. I’d initially heard of this years ago as a hip-hop oriented service, so it never occurred to me that it might be appealing to our people. I recently heard it actually had metal releases on it, so I signed up for a trial. Is it good for extreme metal? Let’s find out! The first thing I did upon logging in was to search for and add every album in my vinyl collection (which is 95% metal, most of it extreme, majority underground). To my surprise, Tidal has about 80%-90% of it in its system. Very impressive. All of these albums are lossless quality. About 5% of them are “Master” quality, which is supposedly as good as it gets in this environment. The sound quality is great. I’m running it through my MacBook into a Schiit DAC and headphone amp, and on Audeze headphones. No complaints in this department. Where Tidal falls short for me is the user interface. I don’t think Tidal is for serious album collectors and listeners. You have to expend great effort turning off settings and defeating Tidal from choosing what songs to play. It’s like it was designed to pick stuff for you. Navigating through your “collection” is a chore, and different artists with the same name aren’t separated or distinguished. The mobile app is abysmal. There’s no easy way to scroll through the list of artists, so if your collection is large and you want to listen to ZZ Top, prepare your scroll down for an eternity. Even though this is CarPlay compatible and it looks pretty, the app is useless unless you’re content to shuffle random tracks or listen to artists beginning with the letter A each time you get in the car. Tidal has potential for audiophile metalheads. If it could better cater to listeners who favor albums over random tracks, it would be a real contender for your money. I won’t continue past the trial.
