Qobuz vs Tidal compared

I use both Tidal and Qobuz as do many of the members who have posted above but with a little twist. The twist is that while for Qobuz I have the Studio Premier plan ($150/year), which offers full high resolution flac streaming (24bit/192kHz), for Tidal I only have the Tidal Premium (Family $15/month), which only offers lossy streams at 320Kbps.

The reasons I only have the lower tier Tidal plan is first the price, which is much higher than the Qobuz plan, and second the only way to get high resolution with Tidal is by using MQA and I don’t own any MQA enabled DACs.

A few other comments:

I don’t notice much difference between the two services with respect to selection, however Tidal does have more of popular music and hip hop slant while Qobuz seems to have a slightly better jazz selection.

Tidal does have way, way, way better playlists than Qobuz and this is important since Tidal is my go to music service when not using Roon aka when not at home. And when I’m not at home that usually means that I am using Bluetooth somewhere in the playback chain, e.g. iPhone to Bluetooth headphones or tablet to Bluetooth speaker, so lossless playback is not necessary since Bluetooth is lossy. Plus the bandwidth for streaming lossy Tidal is much lower than the bandwidth for lossless Qobuz (although this can be changed in the Qobuz app). For flaky cellular and/or WiFi (like in most hotels) the lower bandwidth is important.

When I go out for a long walk I stream a Tidal playlist on my phone along a set of Bluetooth headphones (Drop Panda, which sound great!) There are almost never any dropouts or other connection issues, the same cannot be said when I try to use Qobuz.

And finally I even listen to some music from Tidal, streamed at 320Kbps, via Roon when at home and my ears have yet to start bleeding :grin: In other words, the music sounds pretty good, even though it is a lossy stream.

So if you have a MQA capable DAC then get Tidal, if not get Qobuz. Both services are very good and very similar.

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