Qobuz or Tidal?


Qobuz or Tidal? And why?

Aurender, good DAC, no MQA. US.
jaybe
So, I recently tried and subscribed to Qobuz.  I can easily stump it with what I thought should have been titles in the Qobuz library.  But there is a lot of there there.  The one HUGE, GLARING OMISSION, however is the lack of a radio-style option available on just about every other free or paid streaming service in the world.  I mean, WTF?  The user playlists are just okay, but it takes a while to find one I want to hear.  I will stick with Qobuz, because it is still a good value proposition, but seriously, they need a random or radio function.  I find that such functions are the best way to discover new music.

If you like to play your music directly from FLAC files and buy high definition tracks at a great price, Qobuz will be for you. If you want to try streaming music in MQA format and discover new hip-hop songs every day, Tidal would be a good choice.

In my opinion, both have their strengths and weaknesses, but the winner really depends on the user's preferences and the songs they play. I'm a big fan of Tidal MQA and will often use Tidal Music Downloader to download my favorite Tidal music locally without the costly subscription fee.

Was using Tidal for a couple of years. Have since switched to Qobuz. It's noticeably better. Not a great fan of MQA.

Like the increasing Hi Res titles as well.

I have gone through probably 4-5 rounds of comparisons. Each time find Qobuz is better. Tidal is muddier for me. In fact, I’m trying Tidal again right now with Roon, cancelled my Tidal within a day and just disabled Tidal in Roon because for some reason Roon seems to pick Tidal over Qobuz. 

I always choose Qobuz over Tidal in Roon if possible. I maintain a Tidal subscription for redundancy; occasionally Qobuz will not have a track or album but Tidal will. I downgraded my Tidal plan to the base option as it now has redbook quality. Happy to do that as I do not trust nor want MQA, and it saves me money. A big advantage of Qobuz is that all hi-res files are packaged in FLAC.