Which Streaming Service Offers the Best Audio Quality?

By virtue of their extensive libraries and inexpensive subscription fees, streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music have become increasingly popular mediums for listening to music in recent years. Unfortunately, these services sometimes compromise audio fidelity in the name of convenience. So which service offers the best audio quality? Today we’ll look at a few different options.

Tidal

This streaming service was created with audiophiles in mind. Tidal allows you to stream music in uncompressed “lossless” formats that are far superior to the compression formats you find in many other streaming services. Tidal’s library isn’t as large as some of its competitors, but it’s always adding more material in crystal-clear audio formats.

Google Play Music

This service from Google doesn’t have audio formats that are quite as good as Tidal, but with a 320 Kbps streaming bitrate it’s still much better than some other contenders. Google Play Music also has an enormous library that includes podcasts and audiobooks as well as music.

Spotify (Premium)

The free version of Spotify uses a heavily-compressed audio format that sounds pretty lackluster on high-end systems. With Spotify Premium, users can download higher quality files that sound significantly better. This option also allows you to listen to your music on Spotify even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

Apple Music

Spotify and Apple Music offer very similar streaming audio formats, but the general consensus seems to be that music on Spotify sounds slightly better. That said, your personal listening experience will vary depending on your stereo equipment and the recordings you listen to. If you’re a die-hard Apple fan, then this service will probably serve you just fine. But if you want consistently good audio quality, then you’re better off looking elsewhere.