QOBUZ feedback thread

Thanks for that! I’ve had Qobuz since it became available in the U.S. and never noticed that option before. I see that the New York Trio’s albums aren’t even being sold though Qobuz now. :confused:

The Qobuz store is an essential part of Qobuz for me. Is this part of your business just as secure as your streaming part? I never want the download purchase option to disappear, and there aren’t that many places to purchase downloads, so I hope it is secure.

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Hi @David_Craff , really glad you’re in this forum. I’m on my second year of using Qobuz and just switched to Sublime after a month of my second year (thank you for the prorated adjustment). It’s also my second year using Roon. I love how your services integrate. Although there were a couple of issues some months back, I find I enjoy using Roon BECAUSE of Qobuz. I only use the native Mac Qobuz app when I want to download/import albums for offline listening.

My only question/suggestion so far is could you guys please add a “Wishlist” in the Download Store? I can’t seem to find it. I want to buy a lot albums but of course my budget is limited so I can’t add them all to my shopping cart. A wishlist would be helpful to prioritize my purchases.

Thanks!

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Just picking nits here, but I have run across a couple of albums that were not available in the store but for streaming only. Just a couple.

Had the same question a while back. Got across this 2018 post by @David_Craff in Audiophilestyle (emphasis mine):

Hello,

There are no rules on the listening skills provided by suppliers. Some only deliver Hi-Res, others only Losless etc… Therefore, for each quality offered by Qobuz, we will fill the gaps by converting from the highest quality provided. We do not do upsampling, however.

In any case, even if MP3 quality is provided, we do not take it into account and offer our own version for this format from the CD quality provide or created. This currently allows us to have the best MP3 quality in streaming.

For losless: CD quality, if this one is provided we keep it, if not we create it from the superior quality.

For Hi-Res up to 96kHz, if we have a higher quality and this quality is not provided we will also create it from the higher quality.

To convert from one quality to another, we use the dBpoweramp software (https://www.dbpoweramp.com/)

On the website http://src.infinitewave.ca/ you can compare the encoding quality of dBpoweramp with other software.

From my searches, I also noticed that the CD prices are different for the same release. CDs downsampled from higher rates are more expensive:
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Notice also that the 96 kHz version downsampled from 192 kHz is more expensive than the 96 kHz version I assume was provided by the label. So, just my conjecture, it looks like Qobuz is putting more value to their own downsampled versions compared to the same sample rates provided by the labels/suppliers.

Is this still the current practice @David_Craff ? Thanks!

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That’s correct. Qobuz are not always licenced to sell everything that they are licenced to stream.

Hello there, @David_Craff .
Just chiming in go say that the possibility to read complete booklets as pdf when streaming from Qobuz is brilliant. I recently listened to some Jordi Savall, and it came with a 89 page booklet full of historical and musical background information. Same for other classical and jazz releases, less pages though. This may be as close as you may get to a physical media experience while streaming.

This benefits roon too, so I‘d love to see an internal pdf viewer at some point in the future. But this is for another thread.

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Big fan of Qobuz, used to use both Qobuz and Tidal but dropped them after they “magically” converted their content to MQA.

@David_Craff please keep Qobuz away from MQA content unless it is the only format available.

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I would not even add Unless it is the only format available. I have noticed there are some tracks that are 16/44.1 on your services that are on tidal, and that are MQA converted to 24/88.2 and I wondered if you and tidal were using the same MQA source.

Can you please check if those MQA tracks you’ve come across on Qobuz are from the label 2L.

I did not mean to imply that I found MQA tracks on Qobuz. I just noticed that I could find a 16/44.1 track on Qobus where there was no other sample rate available and the same track listed as 16/44.1 on tidal with no other sample rates listed, and the tidal one is MQA and is sampled at 24/88.2. Since Qobuz does not have a 24/88.2 copy available, I wondered if the source only provided one file sample rate (or type).

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There are MQA tracks on Qobuz but I believe it’s only what’s provided by 2L (the label) :slight_smile:

Africa is that big lump south of Europe :smiling_imp:

I think the fact Qobuz supports high quality (lossless) PCM, is the number#1 reason why many Roon users prefer its sound, and use the service.

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I think it’s technically compressed as Flac files, it’s just fully lossless is the difference. Lossless compression should make no difference to sound quality.

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MQA is on Qobuz if you have anything from the 2L label. I believe that’s one of the few labels that won’t supply their albums in any other format. So they have a choice of not accepting or having very limited MQA on there. The issue is what if Warner Bros decided to that? I doubt it will come to that since Tidal is currently only provider using MQA, so labels doing something special for Tidal, not the other way around.

Agreed. We’ve been waiting forever over here with zero meaningful updates as to what’s happening.

I use Roon for lossless streaming mostly (well, I want to anyway) so after ditching Tidal, Roon has become largely redundant. I like Roon though, and I want to use it so it’d be great if Qobuz would finally launch in Canada, or at the very least explain what’s going on.

At this rate, if Spotify lossless beats Qobuz to it, I’ll likely ditch Roon altogether in favour of the Swedish overlords.

Qobuz is a great service, I’m a long time subscriber. Glad to see you here David.

Hello @David_Craff,

Nice to see you in the Roon forums. What are the odds we might see Qobuz available in Canada sometime in 2022 ?

There is no catalog difference for a qobuz member with or without the sublime plan. And not all albums are available for purchase. Some album can be only available for the streaming. In fact, the opposite is true.

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