Been a Tidal user on and off for many years. Now I have gone to the Roon-side I thought I would give Qobuz a go.
I can see some Roonies have both streaming services but my thinking is more along the lines of only keeping one. While I will be comparing catalogue and sound I wondered if there were any other factors folks had found important in coming to a decision?
Oddly if Roon had Deezer HiFi integration I expect that would meet my needs as I preferred that over Tidal.
I think ācatalogue and soundā covers the key issues, so that will be a personal opinion on your part.
All I can say is that I found Tidal deeply frustrating in the way it portrayed its catalogue. I find Qobuz clean, simple and organised.
I am very happy with Qobuz. Although I mostly now use it from Roon, the app itself is also worth using, in particular because it lets you download a fair amount for offline use - great for your phone or tablet when travelling,or if your internet is flakey. Their hires is just that; hi res. No contentious MQA chicanery. I suspect over 95% of my listening is from Qobuz; even when I listen to music I have a rip of, quite often Qobuz will have a higher res version.
For me, it was a matter of catalogue. I listen mostly to jazz and classical, and Qobuz had a deeper catalogue than TIDAL, to which I had subscribed previously. Initially, Qobuz missed about 15% of my TIDAL library, but over time that dropped to just a few albums as Qobuz ramped up its own catalogue.
I did not notice any difference in sound quality between MQA and Qobuz hi res, even though I have a pretty resolving system.
Sometimes when one adds a new release from Qobuz to oneās Roon library a red āunavailableā will appear in the track listing. If this happens wait a day or two and then open to the āeditā album function and click on āRescan albumā. More often then not this will remove the red āunavailableā notation.
After initially dismissing Qobuz, Iām now ending a trial version of Tidal soon. Then after listening to the Qobuz founders on the āAudiostyleā podcast Iām changing my mind and Iām going to give Qobuz a try. I really liked the Qobuz teamās ethics when it comes to music and the artists.
Well 13 days into the trial and havenāt found too many differences between Qobuz and Tidal catalogue-wise, at least for my tastes. Canāt say Iāve noticed much of a difference sound-wise either so at the moment itās looking like I will be going from Tidal to Qobuz based on pricing.
Thats news to me. They do put out the files as they have been mastered without further fiddling, so maybe you came across some albums that have just been mastered at a pretty low level?
I never noticed substantial differences apart from the usual few dbās up or down.
My only observation is that both Qobuz and Tidal streams are louder than streaming the same FLAC files from my own server at the same volume levels. That might be part of the streaming company marketing approach? To be honest I am not really hearing any difference between 16/44 and 24/96.