Qobuz Users Update?

I naively thought MQA and the Qobuz offered hi res would sound the same but they didn't guess my ears aren't that messed up. Using my Lumin T2, I could hear differences between the two formats. I know MQA is lossy and I agree with Lalitk and DDude003 there's no "need" for MQA. Bob Stuart must be watching his dream of his own proprietary format slowly starting to fade away in relevance. Lots of bandwidth now and only increasing. MQA is irrelevant IMO.

I recently signed back up for Tidal for a cheap 3 month stint they offered me to "come back".

There really is no comparison between Qobuz hires ( 24/96 and 24/192) and Tidal MQA.

Sometimes the MQA version can send a little warmer but generally the Qobuz files have more detail and dynamics to the music.

Of course if you start with a poor recording, well all bets are off!

Until the "next big thing" comes along I will stick with Qobuz even though it is $5 a month more than Tidal for the top tier service.

MQA is dead.

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.