I’ll be interested as their pricing, just guessing should fall in between Tidal and Qobuz and if so, Ill drop Tidal as I don’t’ listen to MQA anyway even though I have a player than can play it.
Hi all -
New member and I have just added several pieces of hardware to get my journey moving! Now. . . I have done a lot of reading about streaming services and figured I would ask the lovely folks here.
I have three that I am considering.
Tidal
Spotify
Qobuz
There are a few factors that I think would help me if anyone has experience or guidance to share.
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Library size and scope: I would listen to a lot of different music, but honing in on lots of jazz, both contemporary and all the way back to early Louie and Dixieland, and also a lot of hard rock and metal, often lesser-known artists. A weird combo, I know.
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Sound quality: I have watched some videos that say this isn’t super different between the three, but it stands to reason that if I am listening on $1,500 of hardware, it would be silly to fall short on the source. If a non-factor, just let me know.
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Ethics matters, and I know Tidal would be the way to go from the pay to artists.
If this helps at all, I am likely to be streaming mostly off an iPhone or a brand new iPad Pro that is in the mail as we write.
Thank you!
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If you want to prioritize payment to artists you could look at sites like BandCamp where your purchase is directed to the specific artist.
Several of us here have stopped our streaming subscriptions and bought the music instead.
Of course there’s no right or wrong, I’m throwing out another option.
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Lots of discussion already on streaming services. I’d recommend reading through here… What service do you use for music playback?
A lot of people use more than one, but ultimately I’d say go with the one that favors more of the music you listen to or the systems you listen to.
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Welcome. I pulled the trigger on a new iPad Pro today. Pick it up tomorrow. And I will use it to replace my 1st gen iPad Pro, which replaces my 1st gen iPad air… It will be used to stream Qobuz mostly.
I went through Tidal, and decided that MQA was not terribly important. They seem to do some processing with their files, and often they seem a bit louder than others. From careful listening and paying attention to what people say here, I too came to the conclusion that QOBUZ is better quality.
The catalog question is one of the more interesting ones. At first, I thought Tidal had a better catalog, and early on, perhaps it did. I like jazz and world, and it did have very good early latin invasion, back before Tito Puente. But the catalog does not seem to be stable. Some things appear or disappear. Qobuz seems a bit less this way, and their catalog now seems pretty complete. I also pay for Apple Music, as my wife likes the interface. And with the new lossless, its fine.
Most of the time I stream to speakers at a low level using BT from the iPad. One of the reasons for the new iPad is BT5, which will go to a Zen Dac Blue. If you are only looking for CD (Redbook Quality) that’s good enough for my use case. Of course sometimes I use a different stack, and I do prefer Qobuz’ through the Bifrost2 to the Stax amp to the Hive Nectar eStat headphones.
If you eventually plan to run ROON on something, then it really is a question of Qobuz or Tidal. Your point about payment to artists is a good one, but it doesn’t apply so much to Louie and Scott Joplin. Or even Miles Davis and Frank Zappa.
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Off topic: Got mine a couple of weeks ago with the keyboard - love it. My other one was 4 years old and battery was going bonkers so its now doing source duty for some streaming services (plugged in to power of course).
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I started out with spotify for music discovery (then buying FLAC downloads from bandcamp of what I liked). About four or five years ago, spotify had a much bigger library than the others, especially when it came to obscure, new indie rock bands or electronic artists. Now the gap has closed considerably between the different services, and the glories of bandcamp for purchases and for music discovery made spotify redundant for me.
The issue of artist royalties also bothered me, and qobuz sounded much better, so I made the switch to qobuz in the past year.
The one thing I find annoying about Qobuz is that it’ll sometimes have multiple versions of albums and it’s not always clear which is which (e.g. re. release dates), and the sound quality of different versions can vary.
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Yes. That’s an area that ROON helps, though it’s not an excuse for Qobuz not being clear. Unless I’m home, near my ROON core, I have the same issue…Tidal wasn’t any better.
Actually Qobuz pays artists better than Tidal.
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My mistake! Thought I read somewhere Tidal was the better there.
It sounds like there’s a clear reason to go with Qobuz.
Higher pay to artists. Strong and stable library.
Tell me what I am not considering, but this seems a lot simpler a choice than I thought. The interface reasonable? I am guessing Spotify wins there, but I am sure I will manage.
Tidal has a massive marketing campaign about MQA being superior, and their higher fees seemingly support exclusive hip-hop and R&B content. If you are into hip-hop and R&B, that’s great. Otherwise your favorite artists probably get no special attention and maybe less than from other services. You likely won’t hear anything beyond CD/Redbook quality on many setups (especially Bluetooth), and many productions were butchered in the mastering phase anyway. If you are into boutique classical and acoustic recordings source can indeed matter more.
MQA now ‘infects’ hardware and badging so people think they need it. To my ears Tidal’s sound difference is a mixed bag and follows from high frequency smoothing or filtering. Tidal is sometimes better and sometimes worse, depending on how it interacts with the source. To my ears Qobuz and Amazon HD deliver basic source files and sound about the same.
We discussed this influential and critical MQA video and its aftermath a few months back:
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Very cool. Gonna give it a listen. As there’s more or less zero hip-hop in my typical listening, it seems Tidal may not be best.
Quboz again seems the leader and now I’m reading about deezer as well. I’m sure mostly paralysis by analysis… my typical MO, unfortunately.
Very interesting listen! One more point against Tidal for sure.
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Search for the follow-up video (part 2) and the many online articles/responses. GoldenSound suddenly became influential in the industry.
Was already on it. This is great work.
As someone who’s first act was as a journalist, I appreciate the thoroughness and the degree of investigation. Makes me remember the old days (not sure they are worthy of “good 'ole days” label in full).
I think Quboz makes the most sense for me to include music discovery. While purchasing from Bandcamp can absolutely be an end result, I do appreciate that streaming services let you explore quite freely.
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Yeah the Qobuz player is… not great. Search is especially frustrating for me.
If you want hires, use Qobuz through a bit perfect player like Roon. If that’s too much to spend then you might as well just use Apple Music lossless or Spotify lossless IMHO.
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What did you find the hardest or what was it that made the search function frustrating? I use Qobuz on ipad and iphone and was just curious. I’ve searched for artists but was unsure if there was a function that did not work properly, maybe songs, albums, etc?
I had a different experience with Qobuz. CD-quality and hi-res worked as they should via ASIO. The dac changed formats according to the track being played and there’s no Windows mixer to mess about with the output.
Amazon HD was a mess on Windows but Quboz worked fine.
User interface and ease of use is a factor for me, for sure. It’s the only reason Spotify is part of the conversation for me. The artist’s perspective, which tends to lean negative as it relates to Spotify, made Tidal and Qobuz of interest.
@generic’s work re: Tidal has tainted them in my mind, hence questions about user interface. If Quboz is ever a pain from a navigation perspective, that’s a concern.