The difference between Qoboz stream vs purchased songs


I am a admittedly noob, so please forgive my ignorance. Recently, have had the pleasure of getting a Innuos pulse mini, what a game changer! I knew that with the mini you cant buy music, only stream. Using Qoboz, is there’s a difference in sq between the two? I live on a fixed income so I have to be frugal and am trying to figure out where it’s best spent. Thanks so much for any info on this subject.

128x128gkelly

@fredrik222  Yeah, that's why I showed the math.  I surprised myself when I realized that you could literally download a high-definition FLAC from Qobuz in just a few seconds easily.

I use Spotify most of the time since I drive a lot and like to listen to headphones during the day.  However, I use Qobuz when I'm listening on my NAD M33 which has the BluOS built in.  I stream from both my internal network and Quobuz, and you really can't tell the difference between the two in terms of latency or the quality.

And the difference between digital and analog is while you can still argue about the quality of the sound between components (speakers, DAC's etc), digital data in terms of content and timing of data packets can be measured and quantified in a way that gives you something that is directly comparable.

@cleeds  it just proves my point. You can do 30 experiments, or 300, and it will still only prove the point that you don't know what you are doing, nor do you know anything about the technology. 

So that's the end of the road. 

@fredrik222 Interesting thread  It appears Quobuz is using a either a network  protocol or an application technique that will try to dump as much data down initially (which probably works really well for short pop & jazz songs) allowing an instant start of the song and then giving a slower network the time to download the rest while playing the beginning of the song.

For most pop songs, it's seems like that initial chunk may contain the entire song.

It would be interesting to see what happens if he tried to play a long song to see if the data rate stays high even after playing the song starts.

@cleeds 

Interesting.  Do you have any way to share that test?  Because based on what I'm seeing on my own, I don't see an issue with Qobuz;  quite the opposite.

As to the original poster, I have a natural tendency to want to own songs and music I really like.   Yes, I still pay for streaming too, primarily because I like to discover new music (their newsletter is handy for this), and Spotify is great in the car and on my phone because of the vast amount of music available, since the fidelity is more than enough to support listening even on a good car stereo.

Heck, I've gotten into about 4 or 5 musical genres simply because the music is readily available to listen to.