Tidal FLAC vs. Qobuz


Does the recent change by Tidal, from MQA to FLAC make Tidal the better choice for streaming?  Or, since Tidal only seems to offer FLAC on its own app and not the BluOS defeat the purpose since you need to transmit by Bluetooth instead of ethernet?  

Currently, I stream from Tidal over direct ethernet cable to a Bluesound Vault streamer, to a McIntosh amp and Revel speakers.  I have a trial membership to  Qobuz but I find Tidal has a much better catalog.  Since Tidal added Flac I thought it would be the obvious choice moving forward, but isn't the point of FLAC defeated since you need to send wirelessly from the Tidal app over Bluetooth?

mojo771

The upshot is Tidal seems to be abandoning MQA and moving to FLAC. But for now, much of the catalog is still available in lossy MQA. I have Tidal but none of my DACs support MQA so I’m glad for this development. Also note that MQA has been rebranded by the company that bought them out to another acronym I can’t recall right now. MQA might have had a purpose for about 5 years or so when the Internet was mostly DSL in speeds, but now, with people getting down 100Mbps or more, there’s little reason to use it anymore at all. I don’t "hate" it, but just see it as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist anymore. Thinking the current licensing scheme adds about $5 to $10 to a DAC, no biggie.

Once Qobuz ever has a "Connect" app and streamers support it, I’ll give it a shot, but for the most part, I’ve been happy with Tidal. Even Deezer would be cool if they too had a connect app to make life easier.

I converted from tidal to Qobuz earlier this year. I still think MQA sounded better than flax on Qobuz. I also think that tidal has more music that I like: prog rock, jazz, blues, rock, jazz. I used the free program when I went to Qobuz that used my Roon database entries (ripped and tidal) and loaded all the Qobuz songs into Roon that I had in tidal. After this, I received “unavailable” errors next to many Qobuz songs that means the artist restricted these songs in Qobuz, but tidal did t have these restrictions. 1 album with 9 songs had 5 that were “unavailable”. 
If the Best Buy/tidal fiasco wouldn’t have occurred, I would still be with tidal.

@p05129  Can you tell me the program you used to transfer your Tidal library to Qobuz

It’s been a while since I did this. When I signed up for Qobuz, Qobuz asked if I needed to convert from tidal and when I said yes, they gave me access to this program. I’ll see if I can find this program.