Ro's Recz

I always see advertisements for Tidal and other music streaming services offering hi-fi audio, and I have been curious to learn what difference hi-fi audio makes.

In this article by WIRED, it talks about what exactly hi-fi audio is, and whether it is worth the extra premium price. Most of the major music streaming services do offer hi-fi audio, but for a service like Tidal, it costs 2x the price of its normal music streaming service.

Supposedly, hi-fi audio sounds better, and it more similar to what you would hear if you were right next to the artist while it was being recorded. However, this is only for people who are really into music, and even then it is hard to hear the difference if you do not have the right equipment to play the hi-fi audio.

WIRED has a really useful link to an article that lets you test whether you can tell the difference between hi-fi audio and normal audio, and I would highly recommend checking it out if you are interested. When I took the test on myself, I could not hear any difference between the 3 versions of the song (each with different sound quality). At first, I thought that I was hearing some slight differences in the songs, but I only got a 1/6 so I must have been imagining the differences (or I could just not tell which one was better).

If you have ever thought of upgrading to a hi-fi audio music service, I would read this article first to learn more about it, and then take the test to see if you can really tell the difference!