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Holy crap Tidal makes the audio system come ALIVE.

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I use my phone for the hotspot and haven't run out of the 40gb data I'm allowed yet. At the same time, I don't use my car all that much either except on long trips. I'm retired and live in NYC where most of the time I take the subway to get around, at least into Manhattan. And Brooklyn is so congested I don't ever try.

320 vs hifi? No comparison. It just sounds muddy to me at 320. I was in my daughter's car checking out an issue she had with the speakers I installed and she played some boom boom music from spotify. It was a muddy mess. I played the same song on Qobuz at 16/44.1 and at least it sounded like music.

I've never even tried the USB as I skipped over that period of ripping all my CDs and also skipped the downloading from the iTunes store as the 128 mp3s weren't even worth the 99 cents they charged. For that price I wanted 24/96. Hence I don't have a hard drive or stick with music on it.
 
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You can also just download your music to the car while on WiFi. This will get you Hi-Fi-quality audio that doesn't rely on your internet connection at all. One of the best features of the Tidal app, in my opinion!
How many songs can you “download to Tidal” ? I never heard of that.

Starting to go back to Apple Music (wish they had integration) they’re spatial audio does sound pretty sweet
 
How many songs can you “download to Tidal” ? I never heard of that.

Starting to go back to Apple Music (wish they had integration) they’re spatial audio does sound pretty sweet
You can download anything that Tidal has available on their service, which is at least 95% of the music I already own. I've avoided streaming music my whole life, but USB playback in my M3 is so darn buggy that I finally bit the bullet and tried it out. Tidal is a bit buggy too, but it's infinitely easier and less frustrating in comparison. Now I just use USB for the few things I can't get on Tidal.

Speaking of bugs - you asked about a song limit. I don't know what it is, but when you hit it, the app evidently stops working, at which point you have to sign out and sign back in to clear your profile (and songs). My guess is it's not the number of songs, but the amount of hard drive space available. I've got probably 30+ albums on there right now and haven't hit the limit yet (no playlists for me - I'm old school 🙂).
 
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You can download anything that Tidal has available on their service, which is at least 95% of the music I already own. I've avoided streaming music my whole life, but USB playback in my M3 is so darn buggy that I finally bit the bullet and tried it out. Tidal is a bit buggy too, but it's infinitely easier and less frustrating in comparison. Now I just use USB for the few things I can't get on Tidal.

Speaking of bugs - you asked about a song limit. I don't know what it is, but when you hit it, the app evidently stops working, at which point you have to sign out and sign back in to clear your profile (and songs). My guess is it's not the number of songs, but the amount of hard drive space available. I've got probably 30+ albums on there right now and haven't hit the limit yet (no playlists for me - I'm old school 🙂).
Interesting. Maybe I will try. I have a “for the rest of my life” playlist that’s at about ~2800 songs right now. Likely not to fit…
 
You can also just download your music to the car while on WiFi. This will get you Hi-Fi-quality audio that doesn't rely on your internet connection at all. One of the best features of the Tidal app, in my opinion!
I agree. My absurdly large collection is on Tidal now. It uses lots of space but also somehow has higher quality on Tidal than it did before. I’m enthusiastic but not an expert so I also appreciate the simplicity of Tidal. Perhaps my favorite operational feature is the automatic synching between all Tidal devices. Beginning Peer Gynt in Miami and finishing the next day in Rio de Janeiro is pleasing. Showing the album face is a small but helpful point too.

Lest we forget playlists from Apple, Amazon, Spotify and others also transfer to Tidal. FWIW I have managed to move playlist a few times over the years by Tidal accepts them all, helps remove duplicates and often seems to replace uploaded music with higher quality sources. Much of my oldest catalog has been remastered since I acquired them, a good amount having been moved from ancient Revox A77 tapes. I have moved those to multiple formats, most recently in 2005 when I transferred it all using Garage Band at 16 bit/44.1 hz. That was remarkable then, being brand new and comparatively easy to use. OK too long!

Now, 2022, I decided to put it all on Tidal and see what happens. My first album to be played was Paul Whiteman’s Rhapsody in Blue, originally 1924 and one of the first 78 ROM classics. Remastered and enhanced countless times. Now, on Tidal in my Tesla it seems like a modern reissuance. So, I found out there already are two different versions of remastering on Tidal and my uploaded version had been automatically updated. If any among us are Paul Whiteman fans just enter it. FWIW George Gershwin composed that explicitly for Whiteman.

Every day I grow to like Tidal more!
 
Lest we forget playlists from Apple, Amazon, Spotify and others also transfer to Tidal. FWIW I have managed to move playlist a few times over the years by Tidal accepts them all, helps remove duplicates and often seems to replace uploaded music with higher quality sources.
Well, that is great news and something I missed! Would you please direct me to where I find that in the Tidal menus/options? Will very much enjoy that feature. I had used some third part app before to try and move playlists from Spotify over to Tidal, but it wasn’t that great.

Your points will make the music I have on a flash drive mostly not needed, and I presume (get my car tomorrow) that the Tidal interface will be better than the Tesla one for music files you have on a drive. I have been using Tidal at home for about 3-4 years now, but got complacent about learning about new features. I use BlueSound in the house via various stereo gear, some old vintage systems, one pretty decent system in my main room/home office where I have a nice DAC connected to my BlueSound Node I am using just as a streamer in that system. I still play CD‘s and records sometimes, for the fun of it, etc., but very much enjoy the convenience of streaming Tidal, and having that music easily stream throughout the house, the garage, the back deck, etc.
 
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I tried Tidal previously and yes the quality can be Ok, but since I mostly use music off my USB drive with typically 320kbps mp3 although has compression that format, but to my 50+ yr olds ears won’t tell the difference hardly. Tidal just sounds Ok. The audio system isn’t anything special in the Tesla, it isn’t reference quality so to my ears everything sounds just good and not amazing. Audiophiles are picky and I been one since my teens and also a musician.

The Tidal app is a bit of a mess and features are really lacking IMO compared to Spotify as well. Price is more for a family plan compared to others services and my daughter didn’t like the app and features either. And if you use BT to stream from your phone you just killed some of the quality as well. You would be at 1/3 of the highfi plus 1192kbps if you did that. So you paid for something that was just undone by BT codecs.
320kbps mp3? As they say, garbage in, garbage out. The better systems like those in our newer Teslas really amplify how bad something like 320kbps mp3 is.
 
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LOL - audiophile and you listen to music in your car? :)

I guess the best sound, with no extra cost and no risk of dropouts etc, will come from my USB stick full of FLAC files ripped straight from my CDs! But I haven't discovered whether the car supports any kind of playlist formats for those...
With Tidal, yes our cars have become a great listening space. If i can judge and observe the producers use of vocals, how much space did he use in his delays, his reverb choice and how much of the ‘room’ i can discern— and i can in my car, then yes. It’s a great place to listen to music.
 
But if you stream over your phone, what are the streaming costs if you play a lot of music??

And what’s the compare generally between 320mb mp4 vs tidal hifi?

As inferior as the usb player is, feels a lot easier (and cheaper)?
Tidal download/streaming is so superior to me, that I hit my data limit on Verizon 3 months in a row, so I've resorted to a hotspot which I have plugged into the cigarette lighter in the back of the car. I just turn on wifi when I take off and it finds the hotspot without problem. It uses it for Beta uploads/downloads as well. And it removes the step of telling the iPhone to share to a non-apple device each time. And when on trips, I can use the hotspot for my computer wherever I am, when needing a bit more data than my phone will allow. I'd have bought the hotspot no matter what for those every once in a while moments when wifi is insufficient on trips, but absolutely necessary for work.
 
320kbps mp3? As they say, garbage in, garbage out. The better systems like those in our newer Teslas really amplify how bad something like 320kbps mp3 is.
You are fortunate to have ears good enough to hear the difference. I tried so hard to myself and could not. Maybe with a direct A/B switch I could. I am really impressed at how good the compressed audio sounds on my MY system actually. Perhaps one sad benefit of not great hearing.
 
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What I find is that when I forget to turn on the hotspot, which is frequent, the music sounds muddy and indistinct. Yes you'll hear the highs and the lows, but it sounds like the music is distilled to only hear what is necessary which is essentially what they do with the compression. But what they consider unnecessary is what makes music come alive. But even then, CD quality in Tidal is still a step below what I listen to at home mostly. In the car though it is plenty good.
 
The hotspot is essential to hear any difference. However, once a song is played in HiFi it is stored locally and can be played again later without hotspot. It gets a blue HiFi icon next to it alerting you to the fact. Nice perk.

That would be for streaming, right? Probably not an issue if you have previously downloaded tunes at higher quality via WiFi at home, I would think and think I have read here.
 
That would be for streaming, right? Probably not an issue if you have previously downloaded tunes at higher quality via WiFi at home, I would think and think I have read here.
That's right. It is just that once you are moving around there is always something else that you want to hear too and having the hotspot makes it possible in hifi CD quality. I hate calling it hifi. That insinuates that this is something special when it's been around since the mid '80s and it is the compressed music that came later. Maybe they should tag that as "LoFi" instead of calling CD quality "HiFi".
 
I agree the compressed mp3 crap we all got used to over the past 30+ years is the real deviant. Call it "LoFi". I'm okay with CD quality being called HiFi though, because if it's done right it should be pretty close to ideal.

The CD format (44.1kHz/16bit) may have been around since the 80's, but the supporting electronics that make playback possible including DACs and filters have come a long way since then, and these have a huge effect on final audio quality. In principle, it should not be possible to hear any fidelity improvement beyond this sampling rate and bit depth unless you can hear over 20kHz or perceive beyond 96dB of dynamic range. But this is only true if we perfectly process all the data with ideal circuits, which is never the case in reality.
 
This is why I listen to hi-res as much as possible. The CD standard may be theoretically correct but implementation didn't keep up. I've seen the comment that CD could barely get you 13 bits reliably, and way too many samples were extrapolated. Current streaming is better because it doesn't have the mechanical disk spinning and hopefully started with a clean master. Ripped CDs are somewhere in between because you still started with the disk even if it could re-read all the bits there could still be some missing. At 24/96 you have so much more to work with.
 
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