There are reasons but this is opaque to consumers right now. A few differences: mastering engineers prepare up to a dozen versions of files to accommodate the requirements of different streaming services, and have to teach their clients which version to send where. Different streaming services also handle loudness normalization differently.
The one sure way to know that files are the same is to capture and do bit-for-bit comparisons. Even then, if you are playing a locally stored file vs a remotely streamed file, you’ll be comparing the way your streamer processes the two types of files.
@Uwe_Albrecht@Markus_Hubner Thank you both for the information. I’ll likely try out Qobuz in the coming days, the psudo-science coming from Tidal turns me off to their service.
@Uwe_Albrecht I found this post that you might find interesting. It seems to suggest that the choice of streaming service doesn’t affect Roon’s suggestions, outside of catalog selection of course.
In the end all audiophile discussions come down to some version of “it sounds better to me” with nothing ever resembling a well controlled listening test, nor any clear definition of what “sounds better” means.
Here’s an example of what I mean. A while back my friend and I were listening to and comparing two versions of the great Kinks album “Arthur”.
Version one being the 24bit/96kHz download from HDTracks played via local streamed files from Roon.
Version two being the original all analog vinyl played on my Linn LP12
To my ears the two versions both sounded great with the slight differences, and yes there were very, very slight differences, being far outweighed by the convenience of playback via Roon.
To my friend the vinyl was clearly “better” and well worth all the hassles involved in vinyl playback (so long as it was me doing all the work )
So sometimes “better” is very clearly better and other times “better” is a state of mind (and, more often than not, about the money one has just spent to achieve “better”)
I hope you noticed that I wrote “the original all analog vinyl” since so much of today’s vinyl is sourced from digital masters or has some digital in the recording/production chain. To which I say that most modern vinyl is the worst of both worlds: the sound of digital with the inconvenience of vinyl.
However full analog vinyl is indeed quite glorious.
btw, for those carping about all the hip hop in Tidal, the latest update is fully customized to your listening habits. looks marvelous, and lots of interesting new personalized mixes and radio stations too.
Unfortunately by skipping MQA master and playing the music on CD Quality means you are streaming FOLDED MQA encoded track anyway. Which is even worse than MQA itself.
If you want to have a pure experience of untouched and lossless track you need to listen the the ones WITHOUT “Master” label on Tidal.
That’s why I don’t bother with Tidal [moderated] and I have my subscription with Qobuz. Which is the only one, real, lossless streaming service which fully support Wasapi in exclusive mode.
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