Opinion: of the Hi-Res streaming services out there, which do you use and why?

@bkeske Given your love of classical music, you might like Qobuz better.

I have Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, and Pandora. The last two obviously are not "Hi-Res"

Qobuz is my go-to. I like the fact that it is more focused towards the music I like (classic rock, jazz, alt-indie), has a lot of hi-res content that doesn’t have a gimmicky "folder", and the fact that they’ve lowered the price doesn’t hurt.

Tidal’s focus on hip-hop and R&B means I have to wade through a lot of stuff that I’m not that interested in and I’m not really on board with the MQA thing. It does however sometimes have material that I can’t find on Qobuz and if I want to just let some music play without having to pick something out, the "My Mix" feature is really nice.

I listen to Spotify in the car mostly, it seems to do a great job of finding music that I’m not familiar with based on my listening habits. The Discovery Weekly and Daily Mix features are what keep me coming back to Spotify.

I listen to Pandora when I work out. Its Techno station plays some great high energy stuff. I haven’t been able to just click on something and have it play the type of selections it does on the other services. Sound quality is not that great, but it sounds surprisingly good through my Aqua DAC.

For my high end audio system I started out with Tidal and when Qobuz became available, had both for a while, thought I really didn't need both (especially since I could find everything I wanted to listen to on both), so I did an interesting A-B test, streaming the same content in 44.1/16, from the same source and into the same DAC using the same input and for some unexplained reason, if there was an audible difference, the Qobuz stream sounds slightly better.  So I dropped my Tidal subscription.

My wife enjoys our Spotify subscription and we have a pair of KEF LS50 wireless speakers in the "open concept" area of our home, that works great too!

It all depends on your system and the synergy of the music services as rendered by your streamer. I have tried Tidal, Qobuz and Amazon HD and preferred Tidal over others. I have a MQA capable DAC and it sounds great to me. And cost wise BestBuy has Tidal subscription deals which makes it really cost effective. $49. For first year and $120 for renewals for their top tier. While Tidal ‘promotes’ certain genre of music, I had found they had pretty much the same releases as Qobuz, and if you have Roon it pretty much recommends the music for you based on your listening history.

Try out the free trials of each of the services and compare for yourself. Each person’s experience will be different. 

Just curious -- how many separate threads does this subject need? It has been discussed many times before.

misstl-- For me, the multi-thread tendency here can be traced to the wacky way Audiogon presents itself on-screen...at least via my Microsoft Laptop. Compared to the other website/chat rooms I frequent, this website is just plain difficult to navigate. Sometimes I just want to reach into cyberspace and futz with a couple of the 'gon's interconnects.