Liquid music and Hi-Fi: the best streaming services for Hi-res music on demand

A clarification before we begin: we say "liquid music" is any song that can be enjoyed without traditional phonographic support (CD, vinyl or tape). We are therefore talking about music tracks present as digital files in our hard disks, on a memory card, on a USB stick or, again, in a portable player such as any MP3 player. PCs configured for music playback are an excellent solution, despite the fact that the built-in DACs are poor (PC sound card), and therefore the purchase of an external one is required, and despite the noise emitted by the fans for cooling. For this, too, Ricable designed its USB cable, so as to give even Hi-Fi liquid music users adequate support.

The liquid music boom in Italy and around the world occurred in the early 2000s, although the terminology "liquid music" did not take hold until around 2006, among both the trade press and listeners. The very first MP3 player dates back almost a decade earlier, however. The first to be marketed was the MPMan F10, unveiled in March 1998 at the CeBIT trade show by the South Korean company Saehan Information Systems and marketed by Either Labs the following summer at a price of $250 with (today's ridiculous) 32 MB of flash memory.

Needless to get around it. Beyond the unquestionable merits that liquid music may have, such as objective space gain and total portability, what has dramatically favored its spread has been sharing, illegally, among users. Peer-to-peer exchange platforms such as Napster, Audiogalaxy, LimeWire, and eMule have had an easy time of it, achieving jaw-dropping results and enviable skeletons. Just think of "the mule," capable of boasting an intuitive and simple interface, a localization in forty different languages, a community still active in keeping it alive, and a number of downloads (updated to 2017) of almost seven hundred million.

Liquid music has taken hold through "backdoor ways," then. But some advantages are undeniable. Think of the convenience of not having to change CDs or vinyl (especially when you own hundreds or thousands of them), the transversality of the playback source, the sharing of music tracks with other peripherals on a local LAN network or via NAS(Network Attached Storage), the possibility of creating personalized playlists (the dear, old compilations... but tailored to us), the certainty of being able to play a track countless times without fear of deterioration. And to so much more. Such as the far from trivial possibility of discovering new artists thanks to the suggestions of any on-demand Hi-Fi liquid music service.

What liquid music has never really rhymed with, until recently, has been quality. You want for significantly slower connections than today's, smaller storage spaces, or sharing files as quickly as possible with friends and family. A mirror-image situation to all this (fast Internet, USB pen drives of hundreds of GB that can be purchased cheaply, and legal services that have been able to tap into listeners' needs with competitive offerings) has finally opened the doors of liquid music to audiophiles.

How? Thanks to the gradual decrease of the initially most popular compressed or lossy files (MP3, AAC, Ogg, and so on) compared to the native ones (WAV), in favor of the compressed lossless or even uncompressed or lossless ones (think of the FLAC format, which is capable, through a refined encoding, of keeping the WAV quality unchanged, while reducing the space occupied). In compressed files, all those audio frequencies that are not essential to the overall message are eliminated. Drastically benefiting will be the space occupied on the hard disk, but all those nuances, not even too subtle, typical of the music recording phase, will be eliminated. Uncompressed files, on the other hand, enjoy resolutions and sampling that go far beyond those of CDs, so, at least qualitatively, they are objectively better than the latter.

In general, 24-bit/96 kHz and 24-bit/192 kHz recordings are considered excellent. However, the highest level of audio quality is achieved with 24-bit/352 kHz WAV DXD format files. It should not be forgotten, however, that these values are not the only ones. It is always a good idea to check that the files themselves are not the oversampling performed from normal CD-quality material, but instead that the recordings were made directly from the original master.

Let us now discuss platforms for streaming Hi-Fi on-demand liquid music playback. By these we are not referring to the software preinstalled on Windows or Mac PCs (Windows Media Player and iTunes, respectively), useful for playing back audio files we have saved locally. For such programs-there are plenty of them, including free ones-there would be a separate discussion. With some of them it is also possible to convert your collection to CDs, so that you do not have to buy them again. Some even allow you to digitize your vinyls into HD using capture cards with high-quality analog-to-digital converters.

Coming to the point, the best on-demand streaming platform for a Hi-Fi-loving audiophile is definitely Tidal. The sound quality is currently unmatched (but not unmatched) by the competition, the interface is very intuitive, the library currently boasts more than sixty million songs (almost two hundred thousand of which are in high definition), and the app is available for iOS, Android, and desktop, although if you wish you can also rely on the simple browser via web player. Finally, there are two types of subscriptions. The most expensive one is no more than twenty euros per month, with the possibility of taking out a family subscription saving even more. There is also a thirty-day free trial option. At present, there is no reason for an audiophile to choose anything else.

A viable competitor is Spotify. It is the one we would undoubtedly recommend to anyone who is a music lover but not an audiophile. The interface is good, the quality decent, but above all, and in this it is superior even to Tidal, Spotify boasts a superlative system of creating playlists based on our tastes, capable of introducing us to artists we will love. Also valuable is Apple Music, exclusive to Apple customers. It suffers from a structural problem, however: it has everything Tidal offers, but everything has a few less details. The music quality is good, but not as good as Tidal's; the interface is good, but still a step below Tidal's; and so on. And this is without adding anything, as Spotify does, which is inferior to Tidal in so many aspects, but at least has a single reason to be preferred (the possibility of discovering new music).

This is what the creators of Primephonic, which presides over the classical music genre. It also boasts ad hoc features for those who are beginners and want to start learning about it. It has a smaller volume catalog than its competitors, but if you are a lover of classical music (and only that), Primephonic is the right choice. Perhaps pair it with another platform that is a bit more "flexible." For Amazon Music Unlimitedd the argument is similar to Apple Music: the service is great, but there are no compelling reasons to prefer it, except, perhaps, extended cross-platform compatibility. In fact, the Amazon on-demand service also works with smart TVs, cars, and, clearly, Amazon Echo. We recommend it to those who are loyal Amazon customers and already enjoy the various Prime, Video and the like. So as not to break up their subscriptions too much and perhaps enjoy some loyalty-related offers.

Closing our review are. Deezer, which also focuses on podcasts; Qobuz, which can be used without a subscription; and YouTube Music which, to little surprise, focuses heavily on music clips but does not convince on the quality front.