It’s driving me crazy with both Qobuz and Tidal in Roon not having good loudness data in the Qobuz US catalog. I can listen to anything Tidal with -16LUFS set in Roon to match the official recommendations (and to match iTunes SoundCheck since I switch to that sometimes), and loudness is pretty consistent through any tracks I play. Then Qobuz tracks come on. Most of the catalog seems to have no loudness data, so Roon’s picking the -5db default. I can bump that down but that would be counter-productive for classical use. But then a lot of stuff that is tagged seems tagged incorrectly, where something only drops -0.5db and is clearly way louder than the same track on Tidal.
Are things better with the EU/UK catalog, or is that just how Qobuz does things?
Ahh, so it’s the same. That’s weird, I’d have thought that Qobuz being all about SQ above all else would have had that part built into their own player ages ago! Bit-perfect would have been a beautiful pipe dream had the loudness wars never happened. At least it sounds like Roon is prodding them to work on it…though they don’t seem terribly cooperative. Thanks!
I was amazed they messed up their US launch so badly, but it sounds like they don’t really have their act together in the UK, either, after years…that’s not very inspiring. …Maybe it’s better in France?
That’s a really interesting and informative document! I didn’t know Tidal was replacing the infamous watermarked recordings. The catalogs and sound quality line up kind of where I expected, with some disagreement or surprises.
One thing out of date is Deezer has normalization now, though it also applies compression like Spotify either used to do or still does on the settings above “quiet”. Ugh.
I still don’t get Qobuz though. They’re all about music. They’re all about sound quality. And it never occurred to them to implement normalization?! I can understand their limited library. IT’s a competitive space and there’s no room for newcomers. They can’t afford the labels demands. Ok, fine, they can differentiate themselves some other way. But not including basic normalization is just plain asleep at the switch.
Bump. While Qobuz is rolling out track-only volume leveling, it’s much higher dB than either local Roon analyzed tracks/albums as well as Tidal.
Not using the same ‘standard’ defeats the purpose of volume leveling!
Something is completely broken with Qobuz volume leveling. I get the same reduction regardless of the LUFS setting in Roon. -edit: scratch that, this track didn’t have leveling so was using my unknown setting of -3dB.
Regardless, Qobuz leveling isn’t useful or compatible with Roon local nor Tidal via Roon.