Now for my money the “least clipped looking” is possibly the worst sounding of the three, but the final level is pretty conservative compared to the others. IMO it’s also clearly the best musically and the only one I’ll listen to regularly/again, despite the slightly iffy recording quality. Thanks, @florib I do like the album and have bought it, it sounds better with a bit of headphone DSP which I turned off for testing.
I did listen to Eden and you are correct. There is audible distortion in the recording. I’m even hearing noise artifacts particularly in the beginning of the piece. Not sure what happened, but I don’t think it’s Qobuz. I’m pretty sure the mastering/mixing/transfer is screwed up. Which is a shame because it’s a beautiful performance. BTW, is it just me or does this track sound like the soundtrack to Interstellar by Hans Zimmer?
Most of the music I listen to is electronic, Jazz, Folk via Qobuz, and sounds perfect via Qobuz. Track or instrument clipping has nothing to do with the service.
There is nothing to do here. Artists are free to change their supplier, label and also to decide with whom they want to be present. That’s why there is some unavailable content in the Qobuz catalog and on other platform too.
Is this always the cause though?
I am puzzled why sometimes just one track in an album becomes “unavailable”.
There are no other versions of the track on Qobuz. It seems unlikely that an artist would intentionally pull a single track like this. And on Tidal the whole album is available.
I would like to ditch my Tidal subscription but this sort of thing makes it difficult.
This happens fairly often with just one or a few tracks on an album.
An example that cropped up today whilst I was browsing connections. It’s not an artist or album that I know but on finding something and being curious, being told that Qobuz is missing few tracks does not help me choose Qobuz vs eg Tidal.
Album “Elaenia” by “Floating Points”
Just Track 2 is “unavailable”. Everything else on the album works OK.
The track is not duplicated anywhere else.
On Tidal the whole album plays fine.
I don’t want Tidal. I don’t like MQA. I would rather ditch Tidal and just keep Qobuz.
Yes, and Qobuz does have those tracks from other albums, and there is another version of the exact same album that does not have those tracks. Seems to me that the larger version of the same album (same title, same artist) should not be listed at all.
The Floating Points album I mentions is not such a case though, and I have seen others.
This sort of confusion does not happen on Tidal. I’m no Tidal fan, I just would prefer to avoid the “what is going on here” confusion.
We work every day to add content to the catalog. Even if our track count is similar to the competition, we are much stronger on classical and jazz music. This was the spearhead of Qobuz at the beginning and we signed a lot of suppliers.
For the others and among others the independents. It is not obvious. A signature with a supplier such as Tunecore does not guarantee us that the artist who passes by him will be available in our catalog. The artist is free to choose whether or not to be present on a platform. It is also necessary that he manually activates the choice of Qobuz and unfortunately we are not always present in the first services proposed… It also happens that the addition in another platform is paying for the artist. Many cases that can explain the difference you note.
We don’t have the same power to convince. And we must not forget that not everyone offers HiRes or even true CD quality. We make sure that the quality is real and not an upsampling which can exclude artists.
I love Qobuz for Jazz and European Music.
I love to buy releases from Qobuz in hi-res.
The electronic section however is lacking a lot of releases. Because I do explore the electronic scene a lot, this is at the moment the only reason why I’m still on Tidal and can’t switch to Qobuz.
Are there any plans to enrich the electronic section?
Hi David, can there be an option for Roon to create playlists in Qobuz? I really love Qobuz and it will be a great feature if I can create Qobuz playlists directly from Roon.
