This wasn’t scientific by any means but it’s interesting. I wonder whether Tidal would ever make the effort to do real scientific listening tests to determine whether Tidal hifi is really “better” than lossy streaming.
The answer is easy’ Lossy compression discards musical information and lossless does not. So of you listen on any decent system in a quiet environment the lossless will sound better.
That’s why people buy Hi Fi equipment of all brands along with all the tweaking and snake oil.
If your in, perhaps a Car. MP3 may well be adequate to hear a tune and enjoy it at that time but it is not going to stand the test of scrutiny.
Also high quality full fat audio on a decent system is far less fatiguing than listening to poor systems and MP3.
The upshot is, you can just listen for hours and your brain does not have to compensate which means you are more relaxed.
Just thoughts, as I see it, Chris
NPR has a listening test to which I easily passed even with my 56 year old ears.
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality