Quobuz subscription
Hi I've recently joined Quobuz to try-out few tracks.
The ones released on 70's and 80's Japanese jazz vinyls sound really muffled. Thought they would sound better vs. YouTube streaming channel of Terminal Passage that actually mostly plays its digitized vinyl collection, but quality is too far away from even YouTube.
I checked the quality and all of them are CD 44.1kHz, but the sound quality is so far away from CD 44.1kHz.
So what's there to check? Is only major-popular recording industry albums sound good there.
I checked that via my Mytek DAC and via my cheap DAC and both DACs show nearly-same differences on the playback vs. YouTube.
So far Tidal actually gets my best grading on items outside of RR hall of fame or outside of recording industry standards.
It really seems to me that Quobuz is over-advertised.
Entire discography of Masayoshi Takanaka; entire discography of Eloy (german prog band); and manymanymany more albums that show CD quality but sound more like MP96 or lower. According to the most of the answers, Quobuz is indeed oriented on pop music that sounds pretty good there. On other than pop, Tidal works slightly better and closer to CD44.1 |
@czarivey I like the sound of Qobuz but have never listened to either of those 2 artists I have Seychelles queued up for later will report back. |
I always get network drop out with tidal, maybe 60% of the time. Never have with qobuz (though the highest I have received from qobuz is 24/96) I’ll take the lower resolution vs having song stop, restart, stop restart blech, so mostly using qobuz now. Though qobuz “cd quality” for some reason does sound lower volume and muffled vs tidal hi-fi sets and a tidal full master mqa decoded track sounds better than the qobuz 24/96.. if it ever plays all the way through. But I am also extremely rural and using a t-mobile hotspot 100gb/month .. says good signal, but.. not so much.. yeah, starlink does it to me also. |
@czarivey so I compared Qobuz to Tidal using the “Finger Dancin” track off the “Man with the guitar” album. Tidal version does sound a but more open and fuller than Qobuz version and makes it seem like Qobuz is slightly duller. The difference is audible. Although isn’t really my cup o’ tea, that track is pretty cool. I don’t know what the CD sounds like but it almost makes me think that a good amount of compression was used in the recording process itself. But like I said, I have nothing to compare it to in a form of original CD or vinyl, so I could be wrong |
For me, Tidal was better than Amazon music. Then, I subscribed to Tidal and Qobuz at the same time. I A/B’d the two for at least a month. Qobuz was the consistent winner. But that’s on my system. Unless you’re planning to stop by, you’ll want to A/B all the streaming services on your system. Then you’ll know for sure what subscription to pay for. |
