Qobuz and Tidal comparison


https://youtu.be/c3SGLAnweOk

 

They are doing serious demonstration.

The conclusion is that Qobuz give more realistic bass and nuanced details than Tidal.

It is because that Tidal use more compression.
 

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The Qobuz default player was slightly better than Tidal's, although both can stream with the top of the players, Audirvana, and tie on that.  However, most importantly, Tidal is giving me the new king of reasons to subscribe to a streaming service in the first place:  8 rotating smart custom playlists.

It's unbelievable how well my playlists give me a list of unheard tracks based on what I favorite, and also gives 8 unique rotating lists, based on what I play.  Tidal wins that prize, and Qobuz is actually LAST place, out of all services I tried, because my playlist had nothing to do with me, and never changed anyways.  Their home page recommendations list was small, and didn't change for 2 months, and then, only very slightly.  Tidal always tells me when something new comes out.  With Qobuz, all you can really do, is find stuff to look for somewhere else, and then manually search for them.  I don't see the big deal about having a library-only service, even though that's what I initially only thought I would be getting for subscribing, anyways.  Tidal beat my expectations of a streaming service, by giving me a colossal 8 custom smart playlists.

All streamer default player apps suck, Tidall's was the least bad VS a standalone player, until Qobuz somehow managed to almost equal a standalone player.  But I only need a player's default app during gaming, otherwise Audirvana was the newest best sounding file-only player before supporting streaming, and compared to the default player apps, is almost perfection of streaming.

Long-time (content) Tidal user here.  But I'm always open to other opinions.

I have a lot of obscure musical interests (like 1970s Soviet and Eastern European jazz & progressive rock) that Tidal serves surprisingly well.  But I have one big issue with the service:  When accessing it via various Android and eqpt-mfr apps, I have no access to the credits or artist information that Tidal provides in generous quantities in its Windows interface.

How does Qobuz compare on this front?

And, no, before somebody chimes in with a mansplanation, I have no interest in adding a third-party interface like Roon.

Qobuz via Roon preferred and used. So many high res tracks/albums too.

Drop out(s) likely are due to bandwidth (buffering) not the apps. Do some steamers buffer better than others would be a good thing to know?

 

I use both services with my Aurender W20se. I find that they both sound great, as a general rule. Some songs sound better on Tidal others on Qobuz. I like some of the features better on Tidal, particularly the "My Mix" playlists which I use to discover new music. The AI probably isn't as good as Spotify for sourcing "similar" music but I have yet to identify that feature on Qobuz. Qobuz seems pretty basic and I don't like the way they sort their music as much as Tidal. 

This post addresses Qobuz dropouts. I have used Qobuz directly from the Internet to my Linn streamer for a few years. Dropouts happened sporadically. Turns out DNS performance and physical distance from my router to the DNS server can induce enough latent delay that dropouts occur. Linn documentation suggested specifying a different DNS service. I made the change in my router. Either the Google public DNS service (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) or the Cloudflare DNS service (1.1.1.1/1.0.0.1) work perfectly.. No dropouts for 6 months.