Quobuz subscription

Well, the quality on Mr. Takanakas recordings seems to differ a lot. But nothing wrong with the bass intro on "Finger Dancing" through Tidal. Could have been Fagen :)

Just listening to Seychelles on Qobuz… sounds very good. The volume is lower… not uncommon on recordings mastered to sound better, the don’t compress or compress as much. Turn up the volume. Much of classical will have a “lower volume”. 

I have done extensive testing of Qobuz vs Tidal… between sound quality and availability of high resolution music Qobuz wins hands down. They are both incredibly reliable. If you have trouble with them look at your streamer.

Dropouts on Tidal or Qobuz are almost a problem of the streamer… not the service. I listen hundreds of hours a year and maybe have drop outs once a year. A good streamer buffers you from the network. Services other than these two are much inferior.

Are you streaming from phone?  Or just using phone as controller?  

@12many,

I’m streaming via Lenovo IdeaCentre mini desk-top with W10 and SSD fed to MyTek 192 via USB 2.0

The rest of signal path can go to headphones or speakers, but that department is very sound

Seychelles does sound muffled. I tried volume up-down, but try to listen to same from YouTube Terminal Passage who ripped it from Japanese vinyl and then A/B

Try many other non-pop albums simply taken from an entire era of Japanese City-Funk stuff, German kroutrock such as Guru-Guru, Misus Beastly etc

@czarivey -- I've had a Qobuz subscription for several years now and have been very pleased with it. So, I tried out some of the albums you mentioned above by Masayoshi Takanaka and Eloy and can't say I was impressed by the recording quality. My DAC also showed CD quality (44.1K).

However, I don't think any of the streaming services do anything other than stream the files that are provided by the music companies. Qobuz has 80 million files available so I don't think they really have an interest in reprocessing any of them.  And, I certainly have bought a lot of CDs over the years (and LPs prior to that) -- some had excellent sound quality, many were mediocre, and a few downright poor recordings.

I've heard a lot of music on Qobuz with excellent sound quality. I listen to a lot of classical, folk/americana, some jazz, and a lesser amount of pop and rock.  I don't think Qobuz is doing anything one way or the other to change the quality of material provided to them.

Here's an excellent jazz recording a friend referred to me the other day: Till Brönner - Nightfall. Currently streaming at 24/96K to my Sundara headphones.