Qobuz Users Update?

I never state a format is dead. I felt that way once when I stated albums were dead, they were not and albums and turntables never died, in fact they made a huge comeback.

I was a Qobuz beta tester and after my free month signed up for the service, using their Windows10 app, which was dreadfully unreliable, so after a few weeks cancelled my subscription.

I recently converted my Roon setup from having the core run on the Windows10 Pro machine to a newly acquired Roon Nucleus Plus server and it works flawlessly.  So I re-subscribed to Qobuz and now have it and Tidal running on the Roon box and have nothing but good things to report!

I'm undecided on which sounds better Tidal or Qobuz, if I had to chose one, I'd say Qobuz wins "by a nose".  I find it has a better selection of classical than Tidal.  I find that some of the remastered 1970's and 1980's rock & roll sounds fuller, cleaner and more dynamic in MQA, but some don't.  More than a few of my classical favorites sound dull and lifeless in MQA.  One thing I really like about the Roon Nucleus Plus is that, when I have it decode MQA, the end result sounds better (on my non-MQA capable DAC) than running the same option when the Roon core was running on the Windows machine.

I believe that my setup with Roon and both Qobuz and Tidal is "hear" to stay.

I have Qobuz and Tidal currently.

I would like to go down to just one service.  I don't care much about MQA, but I find Tidal has a few more of the artists I want to listen to, but then I find Qobuz has some others in hi-res where Tidal doesn't...

Hoping that Qobuz eventually catches up on artists and selections and I would just go down to one.

Love Roon though!

(hoping Qobuz gets Tool to let them stream...)

At home in a serious listening set up, with wired ISP, Qobuz will sound better than MQA. If you use cellular (on the road). you will have Qobuz drop out, MQA will sound better since the bit rate is lower. I have student discount on Tidal at 1/2 of the price of Qobuz. Also I have the dream of Oppo 205 which has a MQA decoder build in. I will say, MQA sounds better for me. Still, a lot of classical record in is in 44.1Hz/16bits. So Tidal Hifi is right there.

@junzhang10,

As I reported earlier, I’ve experienced zero dropouts with Qobuz or Tidal from my cellular service (Verizon). If you’re experiencing drop outs that’s probably due to limited bandwidth or coverage of your cellular provider. It wouldn’t be wise to make ‘absolute’ statements like “you will have Qobuz drop out” 😉

I can understand your somewhat ‘biased’ preference for Tidal (half price subscription). I don’t want to get into any MQA debate here, please continue to enjoy your favorite tunes on Tidal.