Tidal next week..

SA without Windhoek      lord have mercy !!!!

Draft Lager & Light

I'm very much looking forward to full Tidal support for both my 272 and Muso.

I paid for a Qobus Sublime account a couple of weeks ago (primarily enjoying the discount on hi res  purchases through sublime membership) and had decided not to go for Tidal.

However having had access to Tidal through the beta programme I've found myself using it a lot - especially on the 272 (through multi room in beta) and have discovered a lot of new music. I will definitely take the 3 months free trial next week (who wouldn't??) but I think it very likely I will continue the subscription after that. To a few members points previously, Tidal does not cater as well for Jazz and Classical as Qobuz but I see the two services complementing each other (appreciating it's quite a commitment subscribing to both - but for me the uplift in SQ and wide range of new (and classic) music is worth it).

Yes, well done for finally delivering this.  There's certainly now less reason for Naim customers to look elsewhere for online music streaming support.

Unfortunately, this has come too late for me.  I got tired of waiting and sold my NDX a couple of months ago.  To be honest, I would have much preferred Qobuz support anyway

Aha, been waiting for this to come along  Going to take full advantage of the 90 day free trial and then if I'm happy with Tidal's service, catalogue and SQ I'll cancel the Spotify premium package. 

Somewhat beleaguered by the somewhat uninformed, highly prone to speculation customer base, you mean?

Thanks Mike. I look forward to it.

Nigel

Well done Naim.

Qobuz is a good and popular service but starting with a service that has global reach makes good sense. Once Sonos loses the Deezer Elite exclusive, it would be nice to see Deezer on Naim.

Having recently trialled Tidal and being a previous Qobuz subscriber I'm pretty confident in saying that for me Deezer plugs a lot of Qobuz's indie/rock and pop gaps, and the big gaps in Tidal's classical and jazz content.

Hopefully Tidal is just the start.

Is the Hdx and NS01 getting the update 

Several have commented on the general health of the streaming music business. Deezer recently announce an IPO, valued at around EUR 1bn. Spotify is also expected to IPO but it's negotiations with labels over new deals have stalled over free streaming. Until it signs new deals it can't go to the market.

Worldwide Deezer is number 2 after Spotify. Over the next 6-12 months we will see where Apple Music lands, but it's likely they will overtake Deezer.

Deezer's prospectus makes very interesting reading. They are the first streaming service to publicly share their financials in detail. I was struck by 2 things in particular.

It was previously understood that 75 per cent of your revenue was going directly to the record companies. Actually it's more, potentially a lot more. Last year Deezer paid 84 per cent of it's revenue in royalties. With favoured nation status record companies are requiring services to disclose their existing contracts and are thus extracting ever more onerous terms in any new deals.

Streaming is growing, significantly, but once you strip out mobile service provider deals and special offers only about 25 per cent of subscribers generate revenue. There is a very small pool, estimated globally to be around 41 million people willing to pay. Most people are happy with free options like YouTube.

So why invest in Deezer when it IPOs. They are growing fast, 53 per cent in 2014 and they are doing a good job at converting revenue-generating inactive bundle subscribers (People getting Deezer as part of their mobile phone tarrif) in to standalone subscribers.

What worries me is that now; for the first time we have concreate information on the economics of streaming, it's clear that the only way you are going to survive is with scale. The narrative of being a niche player simply won't work on any financial level. That is what worries me about businesses like Tidal and Qobuz.

No

I'm not so sure that a niche streaming service cannot survive, even though it may still be an economy of scale.  I've always felt that in business generally, a key decision is, do you have a broad offering and cater for a mass market and wide demographic well, or a more focused offering and cater for a niche really really really well?  Either can be very profitable, and I say this not without experience on quite a large scale.  

It seems to me that Qobuz is catering for a niche market, i.e music enthusiasts.  The thought also occurs that said enthusiasts are the most likely to pay for a streaming service, spend money on high-end audio equipment, and therefore more likely to pay the premium for lossless streaming.

One only has to look at Qobuz website to get a feel for who their target audience is, and furthermore, one only has to look at the top 10 albums downloaded or streamed to realise that their customer base marries up to said target.  

Tidal seems more about attracting as many consumers as possible, however unsuccessfully, but with no real focus, or at least no focus that really benefits the consumer.  They have some exclusives, but that doesn't benefit me as a consumer, overall I prefer a rival product by far, so tough luck, Prince; there's plenty else to listen to.

Too bad 

Yes, I have been part of the beta on this as well, Naim have done a great job and it certainly hasn't been easy for them.. There has been a lot of tweaking of the Naim streaming engine to work as best it can with the variabilities of an Internet streaming service.

The hifi service is 44.1/16 FLAC, although it doesn't formally support gap less, the gap does vary for technical reasons on particular albums, and may not be consistent.

Certainly a great job done by Naim, and in the UK if you have a BT supported ISP you will get the best possible access to Tidal, as Tidal appear to currently use BT provider aggregated addressing within the BT AS for the UK for their  numerous Internet access points.

Roll on Qobuz... 

Simon

Indeed, Naim have done a great job in integrating Tidal. You can add a Tidal track or album to the queue and it will swap seamlessly from your server to Tidal and back again. The thing is, Tidal sounds worse (to me) than my server playing cd quality music, assuming that is that you can find stuff you want to listen to, which has been something of a struggle. It's fine if you like pop and rock, but try and find the latest classical or jazz releases, or anything on ECM....

I understand the responses from people who prefer Qobuz and Deezer. Perhaps those will come in time. I hope so - choice is good. 

Meanwhile I'm sitting here comparing Bobby Womack on Spotify and via UPNP, and there ain't a comparison. So bring on Tidal as far as I'm concerned. 

Am delighted to read that the new firmware release fixes the NDS dropout bug when streaming DSD and 24/192 PCM files.

Simon

Re gapless support, I asked Tidal's customer service quite recently where they were with it, and they said they were working on it, and were expecting it 'relatively soon' whatever that means. Given that it's one of their greatest weaknesses vis-a-vis Qobuz, do you have any more info?

Incidentally, Halibut, I don't think any streaming service is offering ECM, is it?

I have not updated my NDS since version 3.22. Will I be able simply to install update 4.4 and be fully up to date or will I need to go sequentially through all the updates?

BTW I'm not too confident about it since the only laptop PC I have runs Vista and is painfully slow!

Unless the record companies change their approach this is wholly unrealistic. They own the product and appear to be taking a very short term approach of charging as much as they can for it now rather than fostering a healthy eco system of streaming providers. 

Qobuz's founder has now used his own money twice to keep the business going. There is a reason he's struggling to get external investors. The record companies are charging unsustainable amounts of money for their product and Qobuz doesn't have a growth story to tell in the way Deezer or Spotify do.

The previous rule of thumb when investing in streaming businesses was you needed 15 million subscribers to break even with a 70 per cent royalty cost. It turns out the 70 per cent number is wrong. Spotify paid 81 per cent last year and Deezer 84 per cent. It was thought that Spotify turned a corner in 2013 but now even with 15 million paying subscribers it's cost are rising faster than it's revenue and is even further away from breaking even.

The new estimate is now 30m subscribers. If you believe there is a world wide pot of 41 million people willing to pay for streaming it may be unsustainable for even Spotify to turn a profit.

To some extent Netflix faced this problem with the movie studios, which is why it started producing it's own product. If you own the content you have a better chance of breaking even or turning a profit. This is not a realistic option for streaming music companies.

Hi Clive,  yes you can go straight to 4.4.

Slow is OK, its just an extra coffee

Or if you are really uncertain, do you have a dealer or someone with a faster PC,   I would be happy to do it for you if you get stuck,  I have done a disabled buddies a few times.  We are just next door counties   

Goon, I don't have any internal info on Tidal, and perhaps if I did I couldn't go public with it. However if you look under the covers with Tidal (by analysing its network traffic) , you see it has quite a complex media spooling system. Here tracks in the playlist or queue list can be sourced from different servers and IP addresses. These seem to be assigned by the Tidal spool/ playlist manager, which loads the track reference into the consumer's streaming device. i notice different pauses between tracks where the spooling is not contiguous from the same server. Therefore I guess Tidal would need to ensue album track spooling is contiguous from the same server, and the track to track queuing time for an album is optimised.

Currently when track media files are from the same server and seemingly when Tidal not heavily loaded the performance is almost effectively gapless, other times less so.

Simon

I completely agree regarding Deezer Elite. I plugged a Sonos Connect into my Naim DAC, specifically to listen to Qobuz. I cancelled my subscription with them because, although I enjoyed their catalogue, I experienced playback problems and quite disappointing support. I took advantage of the Deezer Elite offer on Sonos and found it to be fantastic. No technical problems and a catalogue that nicely straddles Qobuz and Spotify.

I am hesitant about Tidal for the same reasons as others: gapless playback (which I'm sure will be supported soon) and the apparent dearth of classical and jazz (which will be the deal breaker). I'll look forward to the 90-day trial but suspect that I might stay with Deezer Elite.

Another vote for Deezer Elite,  I know a few peeps who use it with Sonos.   The catalogue is impressive & checks all my boxes.  

Indeed, and just proves that the record companies have learned absolutely nothing since the rise of bit torrent sites and having their products fleeced by the many. They are only going to keep fuelling this type of thing through their own greed which is a really sad state of affairs