I find Qobuz as a superior sound quality, Tidal sounds distorted.
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I’ve used both alongside each other in Roon, and as long as you compare the same version of a release, there is absolutely no difference. Period.
And, certainly no distortion regardless of the version played.
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All tracks? As record labels or copyright owners usually upload the very same files to streaming services handling the same resolution (qobuz and Tidal do), that would be highly unlikely.
If just selected albums are affected, it might have to do with remnants of MQA encoded files, wrongfully declared and played as FLAC. Distortion is not what you would normally expect here, but who knows.
One of the reasons why i walked away from Tidal.
Hi @John_A_Leighton,
Based on your description with no details of your system I can only conclude that there is actually something wrong with your stereo and you should investigate.
I’m not arguing Qobuz sounds better, worse, different, or the same as Tidal or vise-versa…. I’m actually arguing that none of the lossless capable streaming services sound “distorted”.
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Vinyl works well, tape works well, but Tidal is distorted. My Qobuz music I can listen to at loud volumes without making my ears ache but Tidal I have to turn it down. Are they trying to save money by debasing there music?
I am finding out that some of the music on Tidal are covers and not the original artist. Which is disappointing.
Maybe Tidal are adding eq to improve the sound of their tracks?
I think you’re going to have to provide a bit more information.
A screenshot of the signal path for each track you are comparing would help.
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More details about this please, this would be very troubling!
What playback quality on Tidal? Are the albums MQA?
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I compared several tracks, released in different years, with the same mastering and bit-perfect play, only FLACs and no MQA. I did this using two methods, one of which was digital capture of the digital signal that reaches the DAC.
I found two situations:
- Identical audio data between Qobuz and Tidal.
- Different audio data between Qobuz and Tidal.
In the set of albums I tested, there were more differences than similarities. I didn’t detect any pattern or rule of occurrence of differences (year of release, artist, musical style, or anything else).
Where there were differences, they were consistent and repetitive, both in terms of type of difference and qualitative/quantitative.
Among these types of differences, focusing on the audio data area (i.e. what interests us as audiophiles - excluding tags, album cover images, etc.), the bit-compare result between Tidal and Qobuz was also very consistent and repetitive.
Also, the result applies at the album level (not track level): all tracks in an album are identical or all are not identical between Tidal and Qobuz.
On the tracks where there were differences, this is what I noticed:
- Digital audio data differs between Tidal and Qobuz.
- Digital audio data from Tidal has a higher peak level (also volume?) than Qobuz. The difference is usually less than 0.5 dBFS. (Maybe it has something to do with the FLAC → MQA → FLAC conversion?..)
- The most important result: For one of the compared albums, I have local FLAC files, purchased directly from the artist’s shop. Qobuz has the digital audio data area identical to that of purchased directly from the artist’s shop. Tidal has it different.
For the set of albums I used for testing, I can conclude that with Qobuz you listen to the original FLAC, and with Tidal it depends on your luck (it may or may not be the original FLAC).
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Interesting stuff thank you. .5dBFS can make a difference if the track is already at risk of clipping so nice find. I always wondered if labels are still trying to use watermarks in their streaming tracks.
My goal was solely to see if the audio data area is identical or not. If they are not identical, then I don’t really care what is different and what causes it. So, I don’t have more details about the type of difference.
However, it’s possible that the volume difference was important, because it all started from what I was hearing: sometimes I heard very small differences, but for a long time I told myself it was placebo and the source files are identical (because the differences generated by different mastering are usually much more obvious).
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Did the same experiment with a bunch of albums. Same result with just a few of them varying. My suspicion would be that Tidal kept some MQA encoded albums or transcoded to a different sample rate.
Even if that is just a small risk with a limited number of albums, it would be enough of reason for me to switch from Tidal to Qobuz. That is what I did, could not be happier, as quality and consistency of metadata is also better (particularly with classical and early Jazz).
That’s up to you if you want to favor some other artist version and allow that version in your Roon library.
Could they have re-encoded their mqa files rather than downloading the original file from their source? Resulting in a reduction of quality?