Haven’t subscribed to Roon yet but plan to soon likely with a Nucleas for core. Can I expect the sound quality of streamed Qobuz to equal the sound quality of locally streamed content on my NAS all else being equal?
In my opinion (and own experience) YES
Easy to test with a trial subscription from Qobuz if you have no subscription yet
Dirk
When I jumped on Roon I had a lot of local files 16/44 and upwards. As I added music from Tidal I compared SQ on quite a few albums with my local files. If it wasn’t for the fear of artists and certain albums suddenly missing in Tidal, I would delete half or more of my local files. SQ on streamed music equals or surpasses the SQ on local files in most cases.
All else being equal, they will sound the same. They are digital files. If they are different formats, masters, resolutions, etc. they might sound different.
not a technical perspective but in my listening experience… no difference or occasionally the streamed version of the same release is better, often if at higher resolution than my rip
I might prefer my local copy if its a different release
[I still buy physical media though - I share your concern over disappearing streaming rights and some of the music I love isn’t exactly popular/mainstream]
I asked the question because right now locally streamed content from my NAS using Asset transcoding to wav is noticeably better than my Qobuz or Tidal streams, all else being equal.
That doesn’t sound like “all else being equal.”
Same difference if I stream in flac for local files, if that’s what you mean.
You might want to try Roon first on an existing computer.
This a commonly perceived phenomenon - any idea why this happens?
In my system it’s all SSD.