The difference between Qoboz stream vs purchased songs

fredrik222

Qobuz download entire songs before playback starts during the streaming, and even stores them in a cache. 

That false, and debunked in this post. This is very easy to test for yourself, so I'm not sure why you continue to make the claim. You are conflating streaming, downloading, and caching.

Yes, @fredrik222 does not understand streaming.

So the answer to the original question, not that I think I understand it.   I didn't know that Qobuz sold songs to download, but if they do, there is likely an improvement in the quality of the digital data, depending on your system.  Downloaded files are not time sensitive so they use error checking, like banking, defense industry, or other critical functions, to ensure that the downloaded file is an EXACT copy of the original file.   

Streaming cannot do this.  Streaming must keep up with the music so streaming always has error management tool that interpolates for any missing bit and moves on.  Now if you have a high end streamer and great internet service to it, there may be very few missing bits.  OTOH, if you are streaming wirelessly, there are a lot of missing bits and a downloaded song will have much better digital representation.

Jerry

@cleeds Thx for the ‘Heads reference. 
@gkelly There’s a trove on this forum about ways to improve (streaming) sound. Search and yee shall find.

Robert Harley’s book “The complete guide to high-end audio” is a great primer.

A well done room (how the room affects sound) is a highly important component and a great place to start. 

I'm not on a fixed income (yet) but I'm frugal, and stream Hi-Res music most of the time. The important detail is that most of the services offer different levels of quality and with actual Hi-Res audio (CD quality or better roughly) you have no need to spend money buying music or managing files. Get a decent player in your budget and enjoy. I only subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited as it's a bargain and simple with our Prime membership. I was also being frugal and streaming from my iPad as I already had it, but then bought a Bluesound Node for its software and feed it into a DAC. Simple and fairly inexpensive and perfect sound. The Node and other players can also pull music from a computer or NAS for that music you may have ripped from your CD collection.

@fredrik222

Perhaps, from a technical perspective we want to know if error checking of the transported digital file is different from error checking with live streams.