Tidal is hot garbage. 100%
not recommended.
I've not used Tidal music streaming before, but since it's now a native streaming app on Tesla, I decided to give them a try. I paid the $2 for 3 months of service trial of the "HiFi Plus" plan which gives me "HiFi" streaming (lossless CD-quality [16-bit, 44.1 kHz], for Tesla) and "Master" (lossless studio-quality [24bit, 96 kHz], for home theater/desktop app).
Streaming in music in the "HiFi" setting in my car, while connected to wifi, I immediately noticed something didn't sound right. The low end
bass was over saturated and there is added high frequency noise.
The higher saturation of bass is especially noticeable and jarring for me across
all tracks. There are certain songs I've been listening to for years or decades that sounded so wrong. To compare, I went back and forth between playing the same song on a USB thumb drive (as 320kbps MP3) and Tidal "HiFi" and it sounds so much better off the USB drive. In fact, I had to put the subwoofer equalizer to -5.5dB in the Tesla to get a more accurate bass response, or even turn off the subwoofer completely because it was that bad. In contrast, playing the MP3 with the subwoofer at 0dB felt the most accurate. I even tried Tidal on my home theatre via HDMI to a 7.1 A/V receiver and the bass saturation is evident even over there, so it's not a Tesla-specific thing. So I thought, whatever filter Tidal is putting all the lossless tracks through is ruining the music.
I started doing some research on the MQA audio codec that Tidal uses, which they claim is "better than lossless". Turns out that not only is it not lossless, but its even worse than FLAC!
The tl;dr version:
When listening in either "HiFi" or "Master" setting in Tidal, you stream a MQA-encoded file. This MQA file is not lossless and is objectively worse than plain FLAC. The "Master" setting claims to stream in studio quality (24-bit/96 kHz), but most of the time it's just 16-bit/44.1kHz audio upstreamed. And since it goes through the MQA encoder, it comes out even worse than the original 16-bit/44.1kHz source! If Tidal just lets us stream in original CD-quality in FLAC without any re-encoding or touchup, then it may be worth it. But until that (unlikely) day...
It's all marketing snake oil: "it's better than lossless!"
(p.s. For those interested, there's a part 2 to the video above which goes over MQA/Tidal's response. Their response is even more absurd)