THE BEST HI-RES ALBUMS ON TIDAL MASTERS

Our pick of the releases that benefit the most from being heard on the uncompressed streaming format

The Montreux Years Nina Simone

Career-spanning recordings from Simone’s five legendary Montreux Jazz Festival concerts, from the first time in 1968 to the final time 22 years later – including her legendary 1976 appearance, widely regarded as the festival’s best ever. The audio quality is truly excellent. From track 16 we get to hear the debut show in its entirety for the first time ever, too.

Speaking In Tongues (deluxe version) Talking Heads

This album makes the most of the higher resolution with its idiosyncratic grooves and playful instrumentation, not to mention two of the band’s finest moments in Burning Down The House and This Must Be The Place. There’s a cracking alternative recording of the former, plus an unfinished outtake of Two Note Swivel.

The Road Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s collaborative soundtrack to John Hillcoat’s The Road is an achingly beautiful yet suitably sombre accompaniment to the 2009 post-apocalyptic drama. Ellis’s wistful violins and Cave’s low piano create an ambience that’s captivating and, despite the film’s overriding theme, never bleak.

Tutu Miles Davis

Tutu is admittedly not an entirely cohesive listen, but it is no less intriguing for it. Inescapably a product of the 1980s, its combination of synthesizers and drum machines that make a bed for Davis’s far-reaching trumpet lines perhaps shouldn’t work, but they photograph a creative mind that simply refused to be limited by genre.

Pink Moon Nick Drake

If the idea of this improved sound is to bring the artist closer to the listener, there can be few better examples of its importance than a suite as intimate as this. As much as you can hear fingers shuffling between the strings of Drake’s guitar, it is said intimacy that here helps foster an even more tender relationship between the listener and the music.