Qobuz Coming to America Soon!


Looks like the French streaming service Qobuz will be coming to the U.S. soon:

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/qobuz-gets-ready-its-close
ejr1953


09-17-2018 1:25pm

I’d be astounded if they hit October - lots of moving parts in a launch like this, for a service like theirs. I’ll be surprised if they even hit end of year.

Happy with either

Just went to qobuz.com and -- yay! -- the pound sign has changed to a dollar sign.  But when I try to log in it says that they are in a closed "invite only" beta.  Now my feelings are hurt that I didn't get an invite.
I received an "invite" and installed the Qobuz Windows 64 bit app on my Windows10 Pro 64 bit, I7 quad core machine, with 16 gigs of memory.  I'm about halfway thru the month's free trial.

The app is "flaky", at times seems to go off doing "who knows what", not making the mouse cursor available, when it's doing that, seems to suck up a lot of CPU.  When it does that, I find closing and re-opening the app doesn't solve the problem, rebooting Windows seems to "fix" it.

Having said that, the app isn't so flaky that I haven't been able to enjoy the content.  I do like the user interface and they seem to have more classical content than Tidal.

I started comparing music I'm familiar with, Qobuz hi-res to Tidal MQA and Qobuz definitely sounds clearer and more distinct, not a huge difference, but definitely noticeable.  Then I compared several albums I'm familiar with, CD quality from both services, and I must say, to me Qobuz sounds a little better.  I suspect that they both have the same 44.1/16 masters from the same record company...maybe it's that the Qobuz app does a better job with the timing of the bits with their FLAC stream, compared to Tidal...I don't know.  But Qobuz and Tidal are running on the same machine, outputting the digital stream via the same USB, using the same DAC...can't explain why Qobuz sounds a little better, but to me it does.

I'm still not sure I'll sign up for Qobuz after the trial ends, as the flakiness of the app is somewhat annoying, but Tidal's streaming is not perfect either, especially when I use it around 8:00-8:30pm (Eastern), maybe a busy time for that data center?