novice wants advice

I'm really enjoying using Spotify Connect.  The "hifi" audio quality mode sounds fine to me and the user interface is excellent, they really have got it nailed on.  Collaborative playlists are fun too. 

I don't use Tidal as i dont want to give my money to the owners,  Kanye West & Jay Z in particularly. 

Tidal does not sound as good as locally stored CD rips and Spotify is far worse than Tidal. To get an equivalent sound from a streamer you should look at an NDX. If you had one you could either keep the HDX as a server, or put the music on a nas and sell it. As to whether anyone is selling anything, take a look at the forum rules, which preclude buying and selling. 

If you had a laptop you could connect that via a dac into the 202 and use one of the various streaming services.

Recently signed up to Tidal and very impressed. I don't agree that the sound quality is obviously worse than a CD when I stream the HiFi quality content. Having so much content at your finger tips and integrated into the Naim universe via the Naim app is liberating and fun. 

I've been with Tidal since the beginning. I absolutely love it. A very positive, liberating, and musical taste expanding experience. I continue to buy CD's for titles not covered by Tidal, and rip them.

I like Tidal HiFi and agree with Timjoebill, sound quality is not "obviously worse" than a CD ripped to my NAS. In fact you are likely to find a newer remastered version of a CD on Tidal, especially if your collection of CDs is as old as mine.

If you like jazz and classical, the Tidal selection is rubbish. And who said the the sound quality was 'obviously worse'? Not me. I just said it wasn't as good as cd rips stored on a nas. Which it isn't. 

I like Tidal too.   I started off feeding Tidal into my Naim DAC straight from my PC, and the sound quality wasn't quite as good as rips played from my Unitiserve, though not too far short.  I since added a reclocker between the PC/Unitiserve, and the DAC,  and now the sound quality is pretty much the same (i.e really good).   Like Pauls says above, some of the Tidal masters sound fresher than my older CDs. 

HH is right about Classical/Jazz.

I have tried Tidal lossless twice.  The quality is very easily heard to not equal the quality of cd's stored as flac on my nas.  The closest analogy I can draw is that the Tidal streams sound a bit like a 320kbps mp3 file vs. flac -- close but clearly not "there."

At its best, I find Tidal not too far behind locally streamed CD rips, but it's still not as good. Sometimes, though, you get lossy AACs even if you're paying for lossless, which is unacceptable in my view. The range of music available is often very patchy, and badly curated, with duplicates, triplicates, missing tracks or albums often in evidence. Spotify is much better, but the lossy sound quality is poor. They are apparently about to release a lossless service which could be worth a look. Right now, there is no way I would consider ditching my ripped CD collection in favour of a web streaming service.

This is a polarized topic. Several forum members report they can clearly perceive a sound quality difference between Tidal and ripped CDs. I confess I cannot really (but then I have a hard time differentiating FLAC from MP3)... And although I agree about the poor curating of classical music on Tidal there's still a huge amount of material out there. Yesterday I could not find the Zaire quartet recording of Haydn's Opus 50 on Tidal (which i admittedly could do so in Spotify..) but did find the complete Haydn quartets on period instruments by Festerics...not bad at all.

Bottomline:  now that I have my NDX back from repair (btw: thank you Phil and Steven for the outstanding service!) and had to part with the HDX I was lent as a replacement unit during the repair, I am very glad indeed -  and this is because of Tidal (meaning the HDX easily held its own against the NDX in UPNP mode)

This was the first time I used this service. The response has been fantastic. Thank you all

Over the past months I have tried three streaming services with my NDX and MuSo. For Indie, jazz & rock, Spotify is out on its own because it knows what music I like and makes it easy to find. But, as already mentioned by others, the sound quality is not up to the level of hi-res services, and I can hear the difference clearly, even on the MuSo. TIDAL disqualified itself early on because the gaps in playback are just unacceptable. So then I tried Qobuz. Being not so savvy, I first had to get clued up via the Forum on how to access Qobuz direct from the streamers (i.e. over my Ethernet LAN and not via Airplay), and I subsequently chose to use Minim Server and Linn Kazoo for this (my music is on my Mac in iTunes and in folders on the hard disk). I can't say that Kazoo isn't problem-free, indeed it is a bit quirky, but it has a handsome user interface and I really like the irony of running a Naim system with a Linn app (since Naim have failed to support Qobuz in their own app).

So to recap: Spotify for user-friendliness and QoBuz for quality while I'm keeping me fingers crossed that the Spotify lossless service mentioned above comes along soon and lives up to its promise.

Tidal is very good for 95% of the stuff, new classical albums as well, it becomes a joy to use with my walkman zx2 as well, I download a 128gb of new music constantly updatin

I'm with Bart and HH on this one. While Tidal "Sounds" good and not hugely off, the musical flow is much better on ripped CD's transcoded to WAV.

Michael Mccullough posted:

I'm with Bart and HH on this one. While Tidal "Sounds" good and not hugely off, the musical flow is much better on ripped CD's transcoded to WAV.

i have the same impression, but the margin is very, very small....only high res downloads are sounding better.

So the hierarchy is......, Spotify (very base quality, actually not advised), Tidal (good quality streaming can be used in a hifi setup), on nas stored music starting at cd quality rips, high resolution audio files Flac or DSD.

I agree with HH. And when streaming from Qobuz, I cannot discern a difference to ripped CDs. In fact, the streamed version is sometimes clearly BETTER. Specifically, I compared a Qobuz stream with my own ripped CD recording of Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms and found the streamed version to be significantly better! Perhaps it depends on which recording master is being played (?). And yes, it doesn't get better than a high-res download. 

Regarding the streamer advice, HH is spot on. I started out with a new ND5 XS and was very happy for a few years until I listened to the NDX. It was miles better, so I bought a previously owned NDX from a dealer a couple of months ago and sold my ND5 XS. If your budget stretches far enough, you get far more bang for your buck with the NDX.

Excluding the lossy Spotify streaming aspect, the point seemingly largely missed when comparing lossless streams such as local WAV streaming, Tidal, Qobuz etc is the consideration of the TCP flow into the streamer and whether the streamer is Naim or another. I have identified sonic differences between different stream sources of the same master (i.e. Identical source data) into Naim streamers. On investigation, these sonic differences equate to different TCP/IP  flow control dynamics and interframe timing... and I have charted these out. [TCP/IP is the series of protocols that allows the internet and home networks to operate]

Certainly if you compare Tidal with a local FLAC stream, these aspects are quite different from each other in my setup.. Further if I compare a Netgear NAS miniDLNA media server with say a Minimserver on Raspberry Pi connected to a NAS these dynamics are again quite different and sound subtly different .. even though the actual source rip is the same.

Further I find these 'differences' do vary somewhat on different firmware versions on Naim streamers.

The new Uniti products have a next generation streaming architecture and approach from Naim, and I for one will be listening to see if these sonic differences between stream sources reduce or disappear whether they be different NAS/media servers and cloud based or local on premise based .. there is some evidence to suggest it might.

 Simon