I've written plenty (everyone here at What Hi-Fi? has written plenty) about music streaming services and their quality. We know their bit rates, or at least our DACs may show their bit rates, but there's always the suspicion that streaming music gets somehow compromised during the journey from there to here. Is it truly lossless? Does it arrive bit-for-bit just as it left, or are some chunks thrown away to save bandwidth?
We have just published a piece in Sound+Image magazine (a far-flung Australian outpost of the global but British-based What Hi-Fi? empire) in which one of our longest-standing writers, my friend and colleague Stephen Dawson, has managed to prove one way or the other, for Tidal at least, whether things come through losslessly or not.
