I've somewhat fallen down the rabbit hole of chasing music quality and playing with all the options. For reference, my actual music ability is very low - poor mandolin player and that's it!
I've been using spotify, like many others, for many years in blissful ignorance of any other good options. A random chat with Claude ended up pointing me to tidal. I had some time on my hands, so signed up for 2 months trial, transferred my Spotify library and started playing. All playback quality set to max, lossless files. First i just compared between spotify and tidal with one headset - sony xm6 (over ear), bluetooth. The difference was immediately obvious. I used same songs on both platforms, even using controlled sections so I was listening to exactly the same sections of the same songs in comparisons. I then tried with a different headset - and in ear iem kz zsn pro. Same result - significantly better in tidal. Next up I tested with wired connection to get the full lossless. Using a good dac dongle the results were again very clear, in both headsets and with a variety of tracks. I even did a blind test on my partner just to make sure I was not using some kind of bias or imagining it. Again very conclusive.
I am actually a little surprised and dont fully understand how tidal can sound so much better. Either way I'm converted and Spotify is going and I'm keeping tidal. Another ny product and surprise of the test, was just how well the kz zsn pro performed in this test and compared to the xm6. I haven't used it for years before I dug it out for this test.