With high hopes I signed up through Roon for the 30-day free trial of Qobuz a few days ago, for the purpose of streaming hi-res, and am very disappointed. From advertising, I expected most of their music to be 24/192. However after searching dozens of albums, I found very few, maybe two or three at most, to be this resolution for streaming–they’re all FLAC 16/44–making me wonder if I somehow don’t know how to use it. Additionally, the wonderful functionality of Roon with Tidal seems mostly not there with Qobuz. After just a few days with the free trial I am so frustrated that I’m about to cancel my account, but thought I’d check with others to see if I’m missing something. My impression is that Qobuz really wasn’t ready to be launched into the U.S. market. Helpful responses would be appreciated.
Jim Heckman
Well, Roon isn’t responsible for Qobuz content, and if Roon/Qobuz functionality is missing or lacking, open a feature request. I suppose free trials exist for a reason.
Hi @James_Heckman,
Could you elaborate on this … as I don’t perceive any tangible differences between the the two.
I would have thought Qobuz service is the same everywhere, and there are many satisfied users in Europe. I do hope the US version is not just a subset? I am soon about to trial Quobuz, I hope that I will not be as disappointed as you.
The US Qobuz catalog is not yet up to speed, but should be as soon as the catalog matches European Qobuz. Why not just stick with Tidal if it meets your needs? I’m currently using both.
I am a very happy user of qobuz Europe. The inclusion into Roon made me a happy lifetime member and the satisfied owner of a nucleus.
Qobuz’s music library is severely lacking. I have zero interest.
I think the experience depends on your taste in music.
For me, I find that nearly all my MQA albums in Tidal exist in Qobuz in the original high res format, and I’m going through and cleaning out, changing the Primary.
And for new albums I pick up, a bit more in Qobuz than Tidal.
Mike, I did email Qobuz twice and they responded, but their responses were not useful to me. Thanks for your response.
Jim
To everyone, thank you for your replies. To restate, it’s quite possible that I am the problem here, somehow missing something. I think I’ll follow Robert’s suggestion and stick with Tidal since it meets my needs. Qobuz apparently works well for a lot of people. I’ll sign off this topic, except for trying to respond to moderator Carl (once my system is running again–nothing to do with Roon or Qobuz).
I discovered the same thing.
From what I can see, the American implementation of Qobuz is a circle jerk performed by clowns.
Slim, best laugh of the day. Thanks.
Of 53 albums (mostly jazz, a few classical) I added to my library from Qobuz, 27 are various above-CD rates/resolutions. That proportion comparable to the proportion in my overall collection. In general, I’m suspicious of hi-res releases for older recordings except when there’s a clear provenance (such as a well-documented SACD release). I’ve found more than a few so-called “hi-res” re-releases from non-Qobuz sources that were obviously upsampled CD releases when I looked at spectrograms. As for contemporary recordings, it really depends on the studio and label. But I only care about jazz, classical, and some so-called “world” music, I have no idea of the story for more popular genres.
Hello Fernando,
Your tastes in music are similar to mine. As for hi-res, my limited experience has been that they are not consistently significantly better than decent 16/44 recordings, although, as you say, it often depends on the studio and label (e.g. ECM has consistently good quality recordings), and of course good equipment can make a big difference. A good aspect of the genres we both like is that they have a better chance of being well-recorded than other genres. Thanks for the good response.
Jim
Good response, Anders. Maybe I’ll do a little more looking.
Jim
Thanks, David. I’m about to cancel, with a bit of annoyance at the apparent contrast between advertised and actual presence of hi-res recordings.
Jim
Thanks, Gery. No doubt there are many satisfied users like you. I’ve been looking into the Nucleus, and depending on the streamer I buy, may buy one if it is a good complement to the streamer. An ideal is a pure streamer where all resources have gone into its sound quality, leaving the Nucleus to do the heavy processing Roon requires.
Jim Heckman
I absolutely agree with you. It’s a shame, because Qobuz has a lot of potential, but I fear they botched their launch catastrophically and it’s going to leave some bad impressions. I’m not sure how they had such a hard time translating their European product to the US, but they’ve been delaying for years, created some buzz, but opened the public beta (arguably a year too late) only for it to look like a wholly incomplete prototype product - which I was fine with if the beta meant free use to help improve the product, but instead they’re charging as much as every other complete streaming service. Worse, back in Feb they made it sound like they were rapidly tooling up into release mode, so I expected within a few weeks it would become a fleshed out product. Instead, most of the problems with playlists they acknowledged they knew about still exist, music discovery within their app doesn’t exist (their support just tells you to use Roon - which brought me here! But it still doesn’t give me a reason to use Qobuz vs. Tidal…), and their catalog is a vacant wasteland. I was super hyped and dropped Tidal the moment the beta opened up. Then by the end of month 2 I went back to Tidal. Which is telling since I wasn’t very fond of Tidal compared to Deezer HiFi, finding their catalog comparatively lacking (it’s caught up considerably, however, but is still a bit behind.)
Ultimately, Qobuz probably had/has a lot of potential, but they did squander a lot of that with a really awful launch. I renewed just to try it with Roon + Tidal + Qobuz…so far, there’s a lot less to pick from than Tidal, and on the occasions where Roon finds Qobuz content, if I check it, it’s also on Tidal. Typically with more from the same artist also available on Tidal than Qobuz. I do like some of their playlists - it’s hard to get some of those genres through Tidal or Roon…but they don’t actually update them.
I’m not into high-res. I’ve been on that ship too many times to be fooled easily. I jumped into SACD and got burned, I jumped into HDTracks’ launch, and at this point find that one out of five albums sounds better than redbook to me. So I’m only interested in Redbook. Sony/Philips was right after all. With good hardware, it really is good enough. It’s advantageous if you’re doing a lot of DSP and room correction, but otherwise, isn’t worth it to me - and as long as it’s only a subset of what I listen to, offers minimal benefit. So given that, the HiFi or lossy plans, Qobuz, annually is a little cheaper, has a far worse app, no recommendations of their own, and a massively smaller catalogue, where nearly everything I find on it is also on Tidal anyway. And they’re charging full price…
I want them to succeed because I want competition in the HiFi space…but a rough start like that makes it a really hard sell. They only bar they needed to cross was “be better than Tidal”…and they managed to be significantly worse.
I fear they’re wisely afraid of Apple/Spotify entering the HiFi lossless market so they’re trying to differentiate themselves by focusing on HiRes. But the problem is the market for that is so miniscule that even the small audiophile market isn’t entirely into it, that without also having the catalog depth to back it up, ti comes off looking shabby. Tidal (and Roon?) is probably doomed if Apple/Spotify go lossless, but I’m not sure in its current state Qobuz could even last that long. They intend to appeal to mass market after they finish audiophile. I can’t imagine how.
Carl, I’ll work a bit more on it and if I can offer anything of value to you, will do so. Thanks for your good inquiry.
Jim Heckman
Musiphile,
As you may see from many of my other posts in this topic, I agree with most or all of your points. Trying to see if I was the problem is why I started this topic in the first place. Your and others’ input have convinced me otherwise. As an aside, I’m a bit surprised that Roon let Qobuz market through Roon’s data base, since the quality of Qobuz falls so far short of Roon’s good record. I particularly agree that music discovery doesn’t exist in their app. I also agree about hi-res, having been disappointed enough times despite enthusiastic expectations. Good equipment can go a very long way in making redbook sound very good. My main concern in all of this is that higher quality (e.g. Tidal HiFi) streamed audio continues to be available. I’m one of the many who think it’s an incredible boon to music lovers. And probably due to my superb system, I am pleased with the sound quality.
Jim Heckman