Other headers are gateways to your playlists and favourite music, as well as purchased music and offline content.ĭisappointingly, while most services have now heavily moved to a discovery model that uses algorithms to recommend new music, Qobuz has barely dipped its toe in such personalisation. ‘Panoramas’ (features on particular artists and genres) and ‘The Taste of Qobuz’ (including Qobuzisimme: music that has received an award from Qobuz’s magazine team) also feature on the home page. Rather than having the left-hand side menu widely adopted by its rivals, Qobuz uses a top-bar menu, beneath which is a banner of featured content and several sections such as ‘new releases’ and ‘Qobuz playlists’.
QOBUZ LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION PC
The interface is a joy to navigate across the PC and mobile platforms, and an aesthetic leap above its rivals that nails the balance between space and content density. Our collective taste, though far-reaching, is by no means the rule, but it paints a picture. In fact, only once since January 2019 – 31 playlists ago – have all our 20 picks been available on Qobuz, with numbers ranging from a high of 19 in March to only 13 last April. New music seems a particular issue, but established records are missing, too: we put together a playlist of test tracks each month and Qobuz is always the service with the most gaps. While it's inconvenient to discover that the latest album or track by your favourite artist isn't available in hi-res on your chosen streaming service, it's downright annoying if it isn't available at all. On the flip side, however, we often find albums on Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer that aren't available on Qobuz at all – which we would argue is a far bigger issue. Numbers rarely tell the whole story, but we regularly find hi-res albums on Qobuz that are available in only CD-quality on Tidal. Recent figures put the total number of hi-res tracks at over 2m, while Tidal claims 'only' over 1m. So overall is Qobuz the winner for me at the moment.Qobuz's comparatively high price has always been partly justified by its exhaustive library of hi-res music (FLAC 24-bit up to 192kHz). As I had no Roon in that time, I used their apps. In the past, I did not notice such a large difference in sound quality using a headset comparison. Maybe it has something to do with the server location (I’m in Europe), used compression technique or master tape used, not sure.
Switching to the Qobuz track made these problems disappeared, the piano sounded fine again and was firmly located in the 3D scene. I noticed that Roon had selected the Tidal track. For instance, yesterday I played Supertramps ‘Fools overture’ and noticed that the soft piano play at the start of the track sounded somewhat distorted and there was some shifting going on in the 3D location of the instrument. Lately I did some improvements in my setup (better DAC and pre-amp) and now I also notice a difference in sound quality when streaming over Roon. So now I use also Qobuz as in the end, this hobby is about finding and hearing music you like (at least for me). But due to their larger collection, that’s 1-0 for Tidal.Īfter some Qobuz trial, I noticed that I picked up more new music due to their pre-selections. Had a Tidal account for many years and liked their large music collection although their preferred music taste is definitely not mine :). In the perpetual comparison between Tidal and Qobuz, my 2 cts.