Which is best for SQ - Tidal Masters or Qobus Studio? Which streaming service do others recommend overall as I don’t want to pay for both?
Hi,
I have a subscription to both services.
I would say that the bigger difference is regarding the album selection they put forward into their lists.
Personally my taste is more European than American, as such, when browsing Qubuz I find much faster some music to my taste.
The sound quality is pretty much the same. The availability of the service is now on par…it wasn’t the case one year from now…Qobuz caught up Tidal…hopefully for them…
Regards.
Ch.
I tend to prefer Qobuz, because it offers real highres material. Tidal only delivers CD quality in lossless form, highres is streamed in MQA encoded form. There is a lot of debate about whether MQA sounds better or worse than the original hires master it is derived from. As a matter of principle I prefer to have the original, so I stick with Qobuz.
I have had two trials of Tidal but I have yet to find an MQA encoded album that sounds better than the version in full resolution on Qobuz. Most sound the same, some Qobuz sound better. This is a personal view, others may come to a different conclusion.
Having said that, dCS probably have the best MQA decoding on the planet.
Thanks for your feedback. I signed up for free trials of both and compared Qobuz hires with Tidal MQA on a couple of albums. I agree, the Qobuz sounds marginally better to my ears. The same was true when comparing standard CD. However, I have nothing against MQA as it’s quite an ingenious technology if implemented properly. For example, I bought an MQA encoded CD and ripped to a USB drive. Through the Rossini, the CD plays in standard resolution but the ripped version plays in full MQA. And the ripped version sounded marginally better to my ears - even compared to the Rossini CD which is one of the best!
MQA CD is about the worst of both worlds. “Normal” MQA is 24/48kHz which expands to whatever the master was. MQA CD is 16/44.1 (actually more like 14/44.1), so the expansion process has about 50% of the information of a normal MQA file to work with. So much of what you are actually hearing is just upsampling of a file that contains less information than a regular CD would have contained.
Having said that, many people find the distortions and filtering that MQA introduces quite pleasing, much like the distortions inherent in Vinyl reproduction. But this pleasing nature has nothing to do with accuracy relative to the original master.
To put some numbers around this:
A 24/176.4kHz master contains 4.23Mbit per second
A 14/44.1kHz MQA CD file contains around 0.6Mbit/s. This is around 15% of the information of the original. There is simply no mathematical way you can reconstruct the original from 15% of the information. 85% of the resulting file will be interpolated and upsampled (even if the result sounds pleasing to the ear).
Finally, every MQA file or MQA CD started as a PCM master. The goal of MQA is to lose as little of the original quality while reducing the file size. But some fidelity is always lost.
No matter “if” something is lost, the MQA versions almost always sound better than 16/44.1 and never worse.
From my perspective as a mainly classical music listener unless things have changed a lot recently Tidal’s UI makes me feel very unwelcome. Its home page appears to welcome only rock or hip hop fans in an age group several decades away from mine. Classical music , which on Tidal for some reason appears to include movie soundtracks and theatre musicals, is almost hidden away.
Further it lacks Qobuz’ curation that provides small essays on the music or artist (rather like Roon) together with other text enhancements. The recently improved metadata now offers what classical music enthusiasts really want, in particular a field for “work”. It isn’t perfect but it is a big improvement.
Finally Tidal, unlike Qobuz, does not offer the opportunity to see the CD booklet which may be essential when investigating unfamiliar music.
Oh, I forgot about the substantial discounts on purchased downloads that Qobuz Sublime + offers. Which is of great use to me as I do not use streaming as a complete substitution for a personal music collection.
As for sound quality , as mentioned, Tidal’s hi-res offering is MQA only whereas Qobuz streams FLAC files up to 24/192. I don’t want to become involved in an anti-MQA discussion so I will leave it at that.
Qobuz is more expensive than Tidal for hi-res content but , in my view , you do get what you pay for.
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I used to have Tidal but tried Qobuz and efter a couple of months I converted my Tidal songs to Qobuz with Soundiiz.
With Qobuz Studio just costing £14.99 it is a no brainer 
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Hi, I use both services, I would say the audio quality is even…
Sometimes on Qobuz you find a high res files and on Tidal it is CD resolution. If X=Qobuz his res files/Tidal MQA files , X > 1.
I would just add that it depends upon the genre or genres of music that you are interested in . Depending upon this, one or the other of the services will be superior ( until they both have everything ever recorded at some distant point in the future 
) .
In regard to which is best for which genre this will also depend upon which country that you ( or rather the OP) live in as the Qobuz repertoire is not identical for all countries due to copyright restrictions.
Both look pretty much identical via the Mosaic app. However I also use the Qobuz desktop app, not for replay but so that I can view the copious amounts of curated text material there like the full CD booklets for many albums and their overviews of musical styles, labels and artists.
The only way to decide is to subscribe to both and cancel the one you least like within the free trial period.
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I’ve had both for a while, Tidal longer than Qobuz. Because of a credit card number change this week, I checked myself before reinstating Tidal. If it weren’t for Roon, I don’t think I could tolerate interacting with Tidal. Its musical focus (as opposed to its overall breadth) is not the least bit appealing to me, particularly the way it is blasted into my face. And then the HiFi Premium price is, to my mind, a bit over the top (even the choice of $25.99USD as opposed to $24.99 represents a kind of profit margin goosing that as a business person I find off-putting). So, I said no thanks this time around.
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Mahler 5 symphony, R. Chailly, Concertgebouw.
Available on Qobuz, not on Tidal…when the Second, same conductor, same orchestra is available on both services…
Chris, I seem to recall reading somewhere the assertion that Qobuz is stronger in classical and jazz, but I don’t know that I’ve seen empirical data to that effect.
I read the same, but not obvious to spot the differences, I knew Chailly recorded almost all Mahler’s symphonies with the Concertgebouw, I was surprised not finding it on Tidal…
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The problem with these kind of judgements is that the repertoire that Tidal or Qobuz have is always changing. There is never a point where you can say that one is definitively better than the other permanently. It lasts only for short periods. I remember David Craff of Qobuz saying that they add thousands of albums a month and I am sure that is also true of Tidal.
Furthermore as I have pointed out earlier, either in this thread or another, the Qobuz repertoire varies from territory to territory so what may be superior in , say, France or the UK is not necessarily the case in the USA or Germany.
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QED. [__ 10 chrs __]
@DaveC
Another vote for Qobuz. I recently changed from being a TIDAL user for 2 years to Qobuz. Main reason was more hirez titles on Qobuz lets one avoid the MQA SQ debate.
I’m hearing lots of interest in Amazon Music. Does anyone know if they offer red book and hires resolution?
dCS folks, is the Amazon streaming service on your radar to add?
Brian, the problem with Amazon Music to date for audiophiles is that their player apps do not allow the selection of “audio device” so that exclusive sessions can be started. In brief and in general ( there are a couple of exceptions) this means that for Windows or mac users the stream from Amazon is routed through the MIDI ( mac) mixer or the Windows sound engine equivalent from whence it emerges in whatever file resolution that the user has configured in the mixer. That is your DAC does not receive a bit perfect stream but one that has been up or downsampled by your computer unless the original and up/downsample rates fortuitously match. That means manually reconfiguring the mixer every time you want to play a different file resolution.
There are are few proprietary hardware related players that avoid this I understand ( those with HEOS) but that is of no assistance for dCS users.
Rumour has it that Amazon do not currently provide equipment manufacturers with a proper API which in turn would prevent the creation of Amazon HD player applications for control apps such as Mosaic. It being a rumour I cannot confirm this is definitely the case but in general I am not yet seeing Amazon HD being added to player apps.
In direct answer to your question they offer redbook which they call HD and hi-res which they term Ultra HD.
Pete, Thanks for the clarification re: Amazon Music. Sounds similar to the failed Pono venture.
As someone who mainly listens to rock, folk, jazz and reggae rather than classical I’d be interested in dCS users views on this debate for these genres? I’m currently using Tidal and I too get a bit bored with the emphasis on hip hop and rap and US ‘r&b’ being pushed at me (a Jay Z influence I assume). Thanks everyone