I sat here for about 15 minutes and tried to remember how I missed this. I apparently had just forgotten about it; buried in my gmail "promotions" folder was my trial offer. I took it.
When it comes to streaming services, I'm used to Rhapsody. I used that for so many years it's almost not funny. This is obviously not as polished or curated as Rhapsody, which had one of the best "radio" systems I ever used and a plethora of editor and user created playlists. Rhapsody has also been around
much longer. This still feels very new.
It'd be moot to talk about the sound quality; it's lossless. When I saw the 1411 bitrate; I remembered this was the second of the lossless providers that was doing raw PCM rather than FLAC. I'm not entirely wild about that idea, and it's not even a bandwidth issue; I've got
plenty. The few Devo tracks I've heard that are already in my collection...sounded like they did in my collection.
Since we're now lossless, how can we bypass the Windows mixer? Volume control on Windows works as well as other sounds - on top of the stream.
This is clearly not bypassing the windows mixer, which leads me to believe that we're not getting bit-perfect playback, even though we're now streaming cd quality. The Tidal desktop software does not appear
to have an option for tweaking this nor does the Tidal web interface.
I wouldn't mention it except for the fact that in my experience bypassing the windows mixer with wav files straight to the dac on my computer makes a giant difference in sound quality. The stream sounds ok through my big rig but could it sound better bypassing the Windows crap mixer?
Anyone?
This is also a concern of mine; and believe me, I'm going to be sending them an email about this.
There are zero sound configuration options in either the browser client or the desktop client. The browser client I would expect to have none; it is going to be playing to whatever the browser uses. However, this option could prove useful if included; which it's not. To make matters worse, the desktop client is ignoring the "default output device" selection in WASAPI; no matter what that is set to, it always loads up and plays to the laptop speakers. That might be fine and dandy....if I wasn't using a USB DAC. I could probably "force" this by disabling everything but my USB DAC in sound properties. I shouldn't have to though; the program should let me at least select a output device.
The Windows mixer is another problem; since there's obviously no sound options, this thing is going to be using "shared mode" output if you're on Win Vista/7/8 (I forgot what XP was like, sorry). That's where software mixing and, possibly, resampling occurs. You can "bypass" that by setting exclusive mode; but that's moot because you can't change any of the sound options.
The best you can do at this point is assume everything they play is going to be 44.1kHz, and set the "default output rate" in the device properties to 44.1kHz. While Windows will still be mixing application sounds; it's going to occur at (hopefully) the native rate. You can actually mute System Sounds in mixer; as well as other applications that might be making sound. This is what I'm currently doing and it seems to be working.