Qobuz Discussion Thread

[sir sanders zingmore]

18 minutes ago, Stereophilus said:

Although worth noting you can turn-off MQA processing in Roon through the settings.

Correct but you still get downsampled MQA when it’s labelled as CD quality 

[NonPlayableCharacter]

3 minutes ago, sir sanders zingmore said:

Correct but you still get downsampled MQA when it’s labelled as CD quality 

 

It effectively means the first unfold is not done by Roon and handed-off to the DAC to perform instead - unfortunately, as I found out, it doesn't mean what I first thought it did which was to block mqa altogether and force the Tidal to hand you a previously hidden and unmolested PCM in the process.

 

This was the final nail in the coffin for Tidal for me. Thankfully, Qobuz launched in Oz less than a month later.

[Citroen]

Tried Qobuz but went back to Tidal.

 

Better choice, off line interface MUCH better. 

Qobuz arguably better sounding but not by enough to justify the negatives.

[TerryO]

10 hours ago, El Tel said:

I did an interesting experiment with a mate a few months back where we got 4 different streamer/DACs together and compared them on both local files (hi-res and cd), Qobuz (this was prior to Oz launch, using a VPN) and Tidal. We wrote our notes separately and blind to each other. The interesting outcome with mqa playback was we both chose the same player/DAC for the winner, and it wasn't an mqa certified device. It transpires that Auralic's approach to filters (after Roon did the first unfold) was better than native mqa DACs. Go figure...

 

 

Having compared Tidal with Roon and Tidal through Lightening DS using a Aries G2.1 I much preferred Lightening DS to Roon. For SQ Lightening DS to my ears was easily superior. 

I reckon Auralic really have their act together on delivering the best streaming sound quality they can.
 

cheers,

Terry
 

 

 

Edited July 29, 2021 by TerryO

[rowbo]

FYI Billie Eilish's new album isn't on Qobuz. Hopefully soon. Who knows why - the behind the artist agreements or is it just Qobuz? Adding to the lack of Eva Cassidy, Garbage and others. 

Continues to be my frustration with Qobuz. Anyway....

[Andythiing]

29 minutes ago, rowbo said:

FYI Billie Eilish's new album isn't on Qobuz. Hopefully soon. Who knows why - the behind the artist agreements or is it just Qobuz? Adding to the lack of Eva Cassidy, Garbage and others. 

Continues to be my frustration with Qobuz. Anyway....

Definitely on Qobuz  - listened to it last night 

Edited July 31, 2021 by Andrew Thiele

[brumby]

On 29/07/2021 at 11:02 PM, TerryO said:

Having compared Tidal with Roon and Tidal through Lightening DS using a Aries G2.1 I much preferred Lightening DS to Roon. For SQ Lightening DS to my ears was easily superior. 

I reckon Auralic really have their act together on delivering the best streaming sound quality they can.
 

cheers,

Terry
 

 

 

My only quibble with Auralic continues to be that they are IOS-centric.  That and the fact that my budget definitely won't stretch to an Aries G2.1.  Realistically, it will have trouble stretching to an Aries G1.0

 

I reckon my best bet is simply to get a Bluesound Node (2.1 or the new N130) new or used and see if it will be "good enough" for me.  If not, I can sell it at a small discount and think seriously about an Aries 1.0.  That's unless Buchardt get their act together and come out with a streamer/pre that matches their speakers for quality.

 

Anyway, back to Qobuz.  I'll be signing up for the annual subscription when my trial is up on Tuesday.  I haven't even bothered to test out Tidal.

[rowbo]

Thanks @Andrew Thiele  - I didn't think to check qobuz itself  Must be a roon thing. Have favourited the album, synced library but still not there. 

Cheers

[astormsau]

I really prefer the sound quality of Qobuz to Tidal in my system using Roon. 
 

I find the IOS app is rubbish though - slow and unreliable. Takes ages to start playing tracks and sometimes just gives an error message. I have had to revert to MP3 quality for streaming on mobile network, often cuts out mid track and sometimes when casting to Google Home speakers it will just give up. I’ve also had it give me errors trying to listen to music which is actually locally downloaded on my phone. 
 

Poor app aside, I find the sound quality fantastic and my albums I really like are available in higher resolutions than on Tidal. 
 

Hopefully they improve the iOS app. 

[cheekyboy]

I was getting a lot of little problems the longer I used Qobuz, drop outs or not playing, slow to load many tracks and some tracks on digital out had so much noise that they were unable to play at all. 
I have both platforms running again as I got Tidal to reinstate my subscription for $2 for two months, so I’ll probably drop Qobuz in late September and go back to Tidal only. I thought Qobuz was marginally better, SQ wise compared to Tidal, but realistically there is not much in it and I don’t have the same playback issues with Tidal that I’m experiencing with Qobuz.

I have made Qobuz aware of these issues, but they don’t seem to be able help and that doesn’t surprise.

 

Cheers,

 

Keith

Edited August 1, 2021 by cheekyboy

[awayward]

I must be one of the lucky ones, use Roon to stream Tidal and Qobuz, I have no performance issues with either, more problems with the Roon crashing on iOS 

[Jakeyb77_Redux]

I find Qobuz boring for user interaction. 
The suggested music never changes and is mostly stuff I’m not interested in. 
Having to manually search for anything (not in my favourites) to listen to is frustrating also. 
I might give Apple another run before going back to Spotify. 
 

[NonPlayableCharacter]

16 minutes ago, Jack Goff said:

I find Qobuz boring for user interaction. 
The suggested music never changes and is mostly stuff I’m not interested in. 
Having to manually search for anything (not in my favourites) to listen to is frustrating also. 
I might give Apple another run before going back to Spotify. 
 

It's hard to argue this. Let's face it, Qobuz algorithms are non-existent. This is where, from a streaming platform perspective, Spotify has everyone else beaten all-ends-up. If you put Roon between you and Qobuz, however, you have an even better solution with higher quality streams as well as really great curation. Trouble is, it's another service to manage that requires compute resources and costs $120/year.

[brumby]

22 minutes ago, Jack Goff said:

I find Qobuz boring for user interaction. 
The suggested music never changes and is mostly stuff I’m not interested in. 
Having to manually search for anything (not in my favourites) to listen to is frustrating also. 
I might give Apple another run before going back to Spotify. 
 

Interesting.  I agree that there is not much in the way of user interaction with the Qobuz app.  That doesn't concern me at all.  Nor does having to search manually which I've been used to doing ever since the advent of the WWW way back in the pre-historic early 1990s.  There's no doubting the fact that I'm a dinosaur, though.   YMMV - and judging from the above quote and several others - it does in many cases.

[NonPlayableCharacter]

On 29/07/2021 at 11:02 PM, TerryO said:

I reckon Auralic really have their act together on delivering the best streaming sound quality they can.

On a slight thread-fork, I'd love to jump in and buy the Auralic Vega 2.1 that I listened to in the 4-way streamer/DAC comparison at my mate's place, but there is one glaring problem. The over-reliance on apple for setup purposes. I will never have anything apple in the house. I hate mqa, but I hate apple morer

 

I love Lumin's approach to customer care -Peter(@wklie) from Lumin is an absolute legend for guiding people. He also described on another forum how Lumin treats mqa and non-mqa streams differently to avoid any compromise of non-mqa material passing through the mqa processing path within their devices. This is a great mechanism, for sure, but it still sticks in my throat that I would be paying uncle bob for the mqa charade in some way.

 

I don't know how Aurender deal with non-mqa material for processing, whether they shove everything through the same potentially compromising path or take the Lumin approach. Either way, they mention iOS alternatives as a front-end as an afterthought, which is not a great sign. Then there is the same conundrum that they are an mqa affiliate and I am not putting a cent into that if I can avoid it.

 

I'm not sure what other options exist at the $5-10k mark for a quality streamer/DAC combo with balanced XLR outs.

 

If my Bluesound Vault 2i (good value, not bad, but not without its flaws) and coax-attached RME ADI FS2 DAC (surprisingly great at the price-point) died-in-the-arse tomorrow, I'd probably buy a Lumin T2 because on-balance, Peter and his ilk are much more of a positive than the downside of being forced to throw a few shekels into bob's super.

 

[Stereophilus]

29 minutes ago, El Tel said:

On a slight thread-fork, I'd love to jump in and buy the Auralic Vega 2.1 that I listened to in the 4-way streamer/DAC comparison at my mate's place, but there is one glaring problem. The over-reliance on apple for setup purposes. I will never have anything apple in the house. I hate mqa, but I hate apple morer

 

I love Lumin's approach to customer care -Peter(@wklie) from Lumin is an absolute legend for guiding people. He also described on another forum how Lumin treats mqa and non-mqa streams differently to avoid any compromise of non-mqa material passing through the mqa processing path within their devices. This is a great mechanism, for sure, but it still sticks in my throat that I would be paying uncle bob for the mqa charade in some way.

 

I don't know how Aurender deal with non-mqa material for processing, whether they shove everything through the same potentially compromising path or take the Lumin approach. Either way, they mention iOS alternatives as a front-end as an afterthought, which is not a great sign. Then there is the same conundrum that they are an mqa affiliate and I am not putting a cent into that if I can avoid it.

 

I'm not sure what other options exist at the $5-10k mark for a quality streamer/DAC combo with balanced XLR outs.

 

If my Bluesound Vault 2i (good value, not bad, but not without its flaws) and coax-attached RME ADI FS2 DAC (surprisingly great at the price-point) died-in-the-arse tomorrow, I'd probably buy a Lumin T2 because on-balance, Peter and his ilk are much more of a positive than the downside of being forced to throw a few shekels into bob's super.

 

DAC/streamer combos are in a race to be as "inclusive" of everything as they possibly can.  It makes sense to do so commercially.  It makes no sense for any of them to exclude MQA.

 

For that reason your best choice is to stick with separate components for streaming and DAC duties.

[NonPlayableCharacter]

4 minutes ago, Stereophilus said:

DAC/streamer combos are in a race to be as "inclusive" of everything as they possibly can.  It makes sense to do so commercially.  It makes no sense for any of them to exclude MQA.

Of course. I rather liked the Topping approach, for example, on some of their DACs where they offered mqa and non-mqa options. Unfortunately, they slowly seem to be abandoning that approach.

 

I would just like to go to less boxes littering up the place and nudge the overall quality up a bit.

[Neo]

I’m considering Qobuzz on the iPhone and wireless Sennheiser momentum true wireless headphones. In regard to hi resolution how will it work and will I be getting say 192/24 for example going to my headphones? Hopefully I explained myself clearly 

Neo

[NonPlayableCharacter]

4 hours ago, Neo said:

I’m considering Qobuzz on the iPhone and wireless Sennheiser momentum true wireless headphones. In regard to hi resolution how will it work and will I be getting say 192/24 for example going to my headphones? Hopefully I explained myself clearly 

Neo

Wireless headphones over Bluetooth?

 

The Bluetooth codec will kill anything, no matter what resolution to below CD quality. Bluetooth transfer speeds are way below 1400kbps.

[sir sanders zingmore]

On 01/08/2021 at 12:29 PM, El Tel said:

It's hard to argue this. Let's face it, Qobuz algorithms are non-existent. This is where, from a streaming platform perspective, Spotify has everyone else beaten all-ends-up. If you put Roon between you and Qobuz, however, you have an even better solution with higher quality streams as well as really great curation. Trouble is, it's another service to manage that requires compute resources and costs $120/year.

Agree. I found Tidals algorithms to be better than Qobuz’s. But given that I listen via Roon most of the time that doesn’t matter to me. 
 

In my experience Roons algorithms have improved a lot recently and I’d say they are now well ahead of Tidal. But none of them are close to Spotify. 

[Garchan]

I'm basically using Spotify for my weekly discover playlist but that's it. I took up qobuz and love it.  The sound is amazing through my limetree bridge streamer,  rme-2, chardonnay, march p451, vaf 25i combo.  I actually like their recommendations too.  As a non roon person their artist info is great.  I had tried Tidal and utterly underwhelmed by the audio quality, user experience and recommendations.  Spotify does somewhat crap on both for its recommendations, but Qobuz searching is kind of like driving through Europe before GPS... somehow more satisfying in the end.

[NonPlayableCharacter]

22 minutes ago, Garchan said:

but Qobuz searching is kind of like driving through Europe before GPS... somehow more satisfying in the end.

Love the analogy.

[Fitzroyalty]

I'm a lurker here and thinking of jumping the ship from Tidal to Qobuz. Because MQA and Neil Young isn't on Tidal anymore, man!

 

Anyone using it with UPNP? I use MConnect. Thoughts on sound quality? Any other preferable want to send the stream to a Allo Digione Signature streamer, preferably phone controlled?

[fjs]

I’m in Australia and recently switched from tidal hifi to qobuz hires. A yearly subscription to qobuz is $6 a month cheaper than tidal. I was never that happy with tidal and qobuz imho is much better. I also have a yearly subscription to deezer for the genres of music that qobuz is light on.

[Guest]

Anyone experiencing problems today?  Have 1 or 2 stoppages previously but not as bad as now.

Edited August 13, 2021 by Snoopy8
Typo