![]() I do find that they seem to have more eclectic choices, with a broader selection of world music, classical, and jazz. The great thing about these boutique services is that they claim to offer even more music, 60 million tracks for Tidal and 40 million for Qobuz. I love music and never have I had so much access to music as I have with streaming services. Further, we can recreate the fun of those mix-tapes with playlists- the modern equivalent. The world and technology moved on, and now it doesn’t make sense to build giant collections of albums and cd’s when a streaming service can offer us far more music than any reasonable human could ever own. I used to spend hours in my bedroom making mix-tapes I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, when we thought mix-tapes were cool. To me, it was a dream to someday have as large a music collection as my father, so I could listen to so much great music any time I wanted. As a budding audio enthusiast, I used to borrow albums and CD’s from my father's collection, each having over 1000 albums to choose from. This is exactly why I love streaming services so much. Whatever the true number is, it’s certainly enough music to keep you busy for centuries. Of course, what good is the streaming quality if the music catalog is weak? I was unable to find a reliable source with the exact size of the catalog for Apple or Spotify, but best I can tell, it appears to be around 45 million songs for Apple and over 35 million songs for Spotify. In most cases, there is no sound quality difference between CD and the FLAC based streaming services. With time and experience, Qobuz started working better with Sonos, so finger’s crossed, maybe the issue is resolved. Compared to Tidal, Qobuz had significant problems, often with the app failing to start the music, pausing, drop-outs, with poor overall quality and stability issues. I can say that its integration into Sonos was very poor initially, but improved over time. My original intent was to report back on this article after Qobuz integration happened, but given the extended 6 months of use, I was able to extensively test its integration into my Sonos system. I have a Yamaha receiver that I had hoped would be integrated with Qobuz, but Yamaha left it out in recent firmware update for my particular model. Qobuz released a beta copy of the software and smartphone app, but full integration into hardware seemed to trickle out. Why would you want or need High-Resolution sound at 24 bit or 192 kHz is another topic, and although I will delve into it briefly here, it is far too big of a topic (and far too unsettled) to go into with any depth in the scope of this article. FLAC is a bit-perfect lossless compression algorithm that is known to not deteriorate the sound in any way. This is where Qobuz comes in, offering a FLAC based streaming service that streams at up to 24-bit 192 kHz quality. ![]() Then news began to pour in that MQA might not be all it’s cracked up to be, possibly even being less than CD quality. For the most part, I simply didn’t hear a difference. However, like many, when I began listening to MQA encoded streams on Tidal, I didn’t walk away all that impressed. When Tidal began offering Master Quality Sound, which used MQA encoding, a supposedly lossless perceptual coding system which could provide High-Resolution sound in above CD quality, I thought of it as a bonus. So far I’ve been all too happy to spend $20 a month on Tidal to gain access to CD-quality sound. I was convinced from these comparisons that I could not live with these lossy services. The best way I could describe it is like taking the life out of the music. The overall presentation just sounded weaker. In my listening tests comparing Spotify, Amazon, and Tidal I found Spotify and Amazon to sound muted with the leading edge of dynamic transients and the bass sounding flat. Tidal, on the other hand, offers a lossless FLAC based streaming option. The major players in streaming audio (Apple, Spotify, and Amazon) use a lossy compression algorithm that deteriorates the sound of the streaming service. Tidal does allow you to download some of your favorite music and play it back via their app which is useful when you're on an airplane and have no wi-fi. However, I am not sure why I would want to buy downloads. I can understand the lure of downloading since I have scenarios where I often want to listen to high-resolution music and I don’t have a good internet signal. Unlike Tidal, Qobuz, allows you to buy the music as well. Both allow you to stream music or download a modest selection of songs to listen offline. Like Tidal, Qobuz offers multiple ways to access music. Tidal vs QoBuz High-Resolution Music Streaming YouTube DiscussionĪlthough both are considered audiophile streaming services, Qobuz does differentiate itself from Tidal in potentially important ways.
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