STREAMING - QOBUZ VS TIDAL AND ROON'S PREFERENCES

I am new to streaming. Have a Good Dac And Music player.

Was using Qobuz sounded Hifi with the treble turned way up, almost gave up on the streamer.

Decided to download Tidal- 100% Better Sounds Like a good audio system.

Not saying anything bad about anything, This boy is enjoying tidal

Bryston DAC Player

I have had Tidal and Qobuz… with streamers that unfolded MQA and not. To me what this revealed was that the quality of the streamer is of the highest importance. When you have a true audiophile streamer it will produce sound quality equal or better than red book CD and analog… MQA can sound good, red book can sound good… higher resolution and analog can sound good or great. 
 

There is a point with really great equipment that it all sounds pretty great… then one versus the other is splitting the difference between really really good and really good.

@ghdprentice Very nicely stated and quite true!

@ghdprentice  "

There is a point with really great equipment that it all sounds pretty great… then one versus the other is splitting the difference between really really good and really good.

And it's a point that many audiophiles, as obsessed as we can tend to be, sometimes forget... the point to enjoy the music; the music is the endpoint, not the gear.

@cleeds

Indeed files altered with MQA are not "bit-perfect". That was Neil Young’s issue with the way they were advertising his music. If they were altered in anyway, then they weren’t HIS "studio masters". I wish MQA would go away. There’s been lots of discussion regarding it and most technical people (engineers) who have tested it with measuring equipment says that it does alter the files, and most damning, they say only a bat could hear the sight difference. And people can argue all day if the difference is somehow "better" than the original.

If Tidal is selling their CD quality Hi-Fi tier and providing downsampled files with MQA stripped out then yeah, they might sound OK (and they do) but once again, they aren’t "bit-perfect" compared to the commercially released Redbook CD.

High resolution files don’t mean much to me unless they were recorded originally in DSD. (When I record live concerts to put on the Internet Live Music Archive I do use 24-bit/48Khz PCM to push down the noise floor a bit). I’m happy with CD quality for everything else, (hence my disdain for Spotify lying to us all last year). I just wish I could get the same "data" exactly as it would be from a commercially released Redbook CD of the same title.

If Deezer or Qobuz provides that, I’ll be a happy camper. Looking forward to trying Qobuz.

I note in Qobuz's advertising blurb on their website:  "Currently, Qobuz has more than 240,000 albums in Hi-Res audio quality. This collection is constantly being added to with new releases and re-issues. In addition, Qobuz offers over 80 million tracks in lossless CD quality."