??? New Streaming Service??? What Do I Get???


I've had Pandora +_ for many years now & absolutely love not only having ready access to all my old favs,but also easily discovering new music & artist..I keep hearing members extol the virtues of services like Roon,Quboz,Tidal & a few more here..
 I'm curious,what does a service like Roon,Quboz or similar offer that Pandora + doesn't?

freediver

CD or better resolution. A high percentage of new music as well as past music is now available in hi res. Pandora is not even CD quality last I heard. If your system is up to it you will appreciate the difference. Qobuz and Tidal are the faves, and as it stands now just go by which one offers that music catalog that jibes best with your tastes.  You can do free trials of both, which would be very worthwhile. 

Better SQ.

If you are happy don’t bother looking.

You might not hear a difference (embarrassing.)

Better SQ?
 I'm setting up my Elite multi disc player tomorrow & going to compare a few SACD's to Pandora+ & see if I can tell a difference...I didn't hear any difference between a $100.00 power cord & a $600.00 Nordost on my SimAudio amp so I'm skeptical...

Some things to consider, both Tidal and Qobuz are around $10 a month, which I find to be a reasonable deal. Both have at least cd quality and many hi-res flac files in their libraries, so much better sound quality. Pandora has at best 192kbps which is low quality. The biggest upside to me is that you have so much more control over what you listen to versus Pandora.  In Tidal and Qobuz you can listen to anything you want, whether it’s a song or artist.  You can make playlists made of any songs you want.  I believe Pandora gives you no control over what songs you play other than the initial selection of song or artist.

This is from Pandora’s website

Premium subscribers:

We offer three audio quality options for Premium subscribers:

  • Low: 32 kbps AAC+
  • Standard: 64 kbps AAC+
  • High: 192 kbps mp3

https://help.pandora.com/s/article/Audio-quality?language=en_US

I’m always amazed at how few people understand bitrate. These bit-rates may be  OK for a phone with a pinhead size speaker. Their high bitrate 192 kbps is an absolute joke. That was a high bitrate 15-20 yrs ago when hard drives were measured in Mega bites 32 & 64 are ok for audio books ...maybe.But I’m not sure that is even used today. .

Consider this. A typical 3 minute song in a WAV file (a duplicate) will be about 30 mega-bites. A 192 Kbps rip of that file will be 3 at the most. That’s 1/10th the size of a copy. What happened to the other 27 megs? Its gone along with all that information. It sounds awful on any system that has any resolution. But its OK for the pin head size speaker in the phone which has no resolution anyway

An Mp3 is similar to a paragraph written without the vowels &/0r consonants. Yes, it can be read. but it wears out your brain from all the translating. The same is so with Mp3. it wears your brain out. Its called listener fatigue A bluetooth speaker can help but the 27 megs are still missing from the music when listening to Pandora’s "High Quality" IOW, you are hearing 10% of the music...just as Neil (Young) said

BTW the highest bitrate for an Mp3 is 320. A FLAC file is generally 750-1300 kbps. Qobuz & Tidal will use only FLAC files Thats the difference you will hear...unless you have a poor system