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Interim report

Posted by srl1 (A) on June 20, 2017 at 07:42:26

In Reply to: New Classical Streaming Service posted by PAR on June 17, 2017 at 02:53:06:

Well, I've played around with this new service, including some back-and-forth with Customer Support, and this is what I've discovered:

If you sign up and create an account, you can listen to full albums uninterrupted. They do not ask for any payment information during the sign up, so I'm guessing that pitch comes when your 30 days are up.

So far they just have the browser engine. I used Chrome (sorry, Ivan) for my tests. First, the navigation is a little slow, but not bad. I did a couple of searches and the results seemed reasonable. I did determine that the playback is not gapless, a real downer for me. I used my reference gapless checker, Noriko Ogawa's Paganini Rhapsody on BIS, for this test. The sound was good. It seemed to be CD-quality.

They do not have apps for either iOS or Android. I asked them about that and was told that the web browser version will play FLAC on Android devices (but not on iOS) and that an iOS app was in development and hopefully will be available "before the end of summer". An android app will therefore be of less urgency.

I tested the web version on Chrome on my Samsung Galaxy Tab A. You may or may not get a warning about being limited to mp3, but press on bravely and select an album/track to play. When the screen for that track comes up, if you press the mp3 button it will change to flac. I listened to the second movement of the new Bruckner Ninth with Muti and Chicago all of the way through using my Oppo HA-2 to bypass the Samsung headphone jack, and it sounded very good. Until there is an iOS app, I won't be able to use my AudioQuest Dragonfly Red or my Chord Mojo to listen because they do not work with my Samsung without going through the USB Audio Player Pro (which does have a Tidal engine), but they do work through the regular apps on iOS.

The gapless thing is a big deal to me. If Apple and Spotify and, most of the time Tidal, can do it, it should be a given with any new entry in the field. Also, I really need an iOS app because that's where I do most of my headphone listening.

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