Qobuz HR albums — for real? (E.g. ACT) [Never mind, false alarm]

To put things in the right context: I’ve downloaded from Qobuz around 300 HiRes Albums since 2014 and among them are 5 clear upsampled and 9 dubious files. Most of them are reissues of Classic Rock or Folk albums, published as HiRes between 2013 and 2015, from Universal Music and their subsidiaries. There had been no reliable upsampled new issues or reissues published in the past two years.
The Eric Clapton album was the reason why I purchased MusicScope as an early adopter in 2015, because I couldn’t notice any difference in sound quality, compared to my ripped CD. Since then, I analyze any HiRes purchase. Usually you’ll get a compensation from the download stores if you can prove your complaint.
It’s not only Qobuz, HDtracks and 7digital are not free of blame as well, but they respond to proven complaints by revise the labeled resolution or append cryptic notes like “Digital recordings mixed analog, mastered to 192kHz/24bit” what means for a digital recording from the 80s nothing else that is is upsampled and has no relevant content above 16/48.

My criticism is that Qobuz does not react in any way beside compensations and is still selling and supposedly streaming the upsampled albums to their customers. It seems as they simply sell what the labels deliver, without any quality check.

Which album is this?

Can you guys with experience clear up something for me?

Somebody said he needs to have a Qobuz login with streaming service to be able to play the albums he has bought.
Is that really correct?

In that case the albums are not really bought. (Yes, I know that legally content is more often licensed than bought, but I don’t want to get into that legal discussion right now.)

If the content cannot be played without an online license check, what happens if I don’t have connectivity? Offline play is often cited as a reason for owning content.

And what if Qobuz goes under?

Flagging @Qobuz for a knowledgeable answer.

Hi Anders,

at the beginning Qobuz was a download store for music files and you usually need to have a Qobuz login for purchasing and download albums. Of course you can playback your purchased files as you like. It is completely independent from any streaming subscription. As far as I know, you don’t need to have a streaming subscription to stream your bought content:

Excerpt from the Qobuz Homepage:
" How can I listen to albums that I purchased as paid downloads?

You can enjoy your paid downloads on Qobuz in several ways:

  • on all the Qobuz applications (in the “Purchase” section), without having to download them beforehand.
  • from the audio player of your choice (like Audirvana or Foobar), after having downloaded them."

The downloaded files are his property with the limitations of a license agreement (no reselling, no descent) of course.

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Great. That’s what I expected.

That means that the issue of Radio stumbling when you enter a Qobuz login that doesn’t have streaming is a red herring, there is no need to do that.

@mike Maybe Roon should make this explicit in the service signup: include Qobuz account only if you have a streaming account, not a download-only account.

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Qobuz seriously need an English language support presence in the UK and maybe the US soon, I have sent them long complicated issues and I’'m afraid I usually get a single sentence response - maybe something just gets lost in translation?

Just being nosey. What were your issues?

Well most recently the Beta feature Qobuz introduced to play to UPnP players from the desktop app - I thought it might enable me to use Qobuz rather than Lightning DS to discover music and play it through my Auralic Mini - complicated questions had to be asked and I don’t think the translation worked very well! I don’t think they could get it to work with anything much, so its withdrawn for awhile - but now I have finally decided to take the plunge and go with Roon that’s not an issue. Also now the new tier of music subscription has arrived (and prices reduced!) I wanted to change form Sublime Plus (I never download and store files these days) to the new Studio streaming only hires offering as it works out cheaper. It was a bit of a struggle working out pro-rata refunds and eventually a Qobuz rep sort of implied I couldn’t downgrade anyway till my yearly time was up - but we got there in the end. I’m a long time supporter of Qobuz but they are French and us Brits did lock up Napoleon so maybe… :rofl: