Guess I’ll wait and see what their US prices are. Have they also announced MQA? Even if they match the price for CD quality, MQA gives Tidal a bit of an advantage. But I’m interested to see if they carry a deeper selection of the music (jazz, classical) I listen to than Tidal.
No mention of MQA yet and I guess that depends on their relationship with Stuart’s bunch. In the EU their prices are an exact match at 19.99 it’s just that we get killed by the conversion. For the three months that my Tidal was crap I was glad to pay the little extra for great “uninterrupted” music without all the Rap music promotions. Now that my Tidal has cleared up just as mysteriously as it started acting up I have kept Qobuz as a safety net as Spotify just wasn’t the same. As to MQA I have tried to really hear an appreciable difference using both the Lumin’s full MQA certification and the Auralic (original MQA member) version and I just don’t hear enough on top of the poor selection to make it matter that much as a choice factor. But that’s me.
Over here in the Netherlands the Qobuz Sublime+ annual subscription is € 340 per year. It’s absolutely worth it with > 70.000 albums (growing every day) in 24bit and always working like a charm. On their website Qobuz stated their 24-bit albums are created by their labels directly. They are not re-encoded using SACD and Qobuz guarantees their direct source. In order to continue on this path, Qobuz prohibits any tampering with the product. Preferring ‘untouched’ 24-bit above mqa I really hope -and suppose- they’ll never offer mqa (which in my opinion is kind of tampering with the product).