Qobuz downloads...comments welcome

Music
1

Are people pleased with this service or disappointed? Do you have the Sublime subscription in order to take advantage of the discounts?

2

I have had the Sublime subscription for a few years. In general, I am happy with the download quality, and some albums that I purchased are not available to stream anymore. The SQ of the downloads are great. In my old system they sounded better than streaming, but with Roon and my new streamer they sounded the same.

Recently Qobuz has started with DSD downloads on some albums too, and the few albums I purchased sounded excellent in my system.

3

I have a Sublime subscription and I buy a lot of music with it. I am very happy with the pricing and the ability to download AIFF format. I am completely pleased with it.

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4

How do you guys have time to listen to downloaded music when there is so much out there still to discover (rhetorical).

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5

I have Qobuz and am most pleased with it. No sublime as in general I do not download.

6

My fear is that one day Qobuz might end.

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7

Sure but the music will continue somewhere else. Carry on.

8

Donā€™t say things like thisā€¦I just started streaming :wink:

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9

It will carry on at my house. Buying music makes that a certainty.

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10

Vinyl is my safety back-up, ha!
Yes, Qobuz has spoiled these ears. An easy recommendation.

12

Qobuz has great sound quality - I stream only for now - but the epuipment you stream through has to be competent enough to truly hear how good it is - recently added a PhoenixNET to my system (Zen Mk3, DSD DAC Mk1, BHK 250) and was astounded at how good streaming can sound.

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13

I donā€™t stream (yet) and I donā€™t have a sublime subscription. I must admit that Qobuz is my secondary ā€˜go toā€™ for downloading music. Iā€™ve had no issues with quality, itā€™s just that I like to use various download shops. I probably first started with HDtracks many years ago but not so much these days. They may have changed but, living in Australia, they had overly restrictive regional geofences. Then I moved to the UK-based PrestoMusic but they donā€™t seem to have as broad a catalogue as does Qobuz. For the moment, Iā€™d prefer the flexibility of going to whichever shop has the download I want without having the ā€˜committmentā€™ of a subscription.

14

A lot of you donā€™t fully comprehend the title of this thread. Many of you have stated ā€œI donā€™t downloadā€, and this last guy ā€œdoesnā€™t streamā€.

Sigh.

You say things that are only important to you, and in most cases is not relevant to the thread topic.

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15

Maybe he thought the thread referred to Sublime the band from Long Beach. :rofl:

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16

At this point our Vince would ask: does anyone want a coffee?

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17

Thank you aangen,
Maybe I wasnā€™t as clear as I should have been. Iā€™ve had Qobuz since it was available in Canada. I was interested in what people thought of the downloads (purchasing music) feature and whether or not they had bucked up to Sublime to take advantage of the discounts. Thanks to some relevant replies, Iā€™ve gone ahead and upgraded to Sublime and bought some music. Easy peasy.

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18

Iā€™ve downloaded a couple of titles with no issues. I donā€™t stream, but Iā€™ve been debating the Sublime subscription simply for the discount. It seems that if you want to download several titles, the Sublime subscription ($14.99j is a no brainer based off the discounts listed with their DSD titles. Example: Dexter Gordon - Go is regularly $32.69, but $16.39 with Sublime.

How easy is it to stop, pause or cancel a subscription? Additionally, any opinions on the DSD downloads? I read that they donā€™t stream their DSD titles, so thereā€™s no way to compare before purchasing.

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19

Sublime subscriptions are for a year at a time, not month to month.

My practice is to get the Sublime subscription, download a bunch of music over the course of the year, cancel my subscription for 6 months, then repeat.

As for the sound quality of the downloads, as far as I can tell itā€™s the same as other download services.

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20

I have a Qobuz Sublime account. I have no issues with downloading files and I download the AIFF files.

As for the cost, there is a breakeven point so you do have to download a certain number of files to make having a Sublime account worth it financially speaking. If you are just buying a few albums per year, it probably is not worth the extra costs.

However, Al is right. Sometimes music on Qobuz (and other services) just disappears. Best to buy the music you really enjoy just in case. Sometimes they have really good sales that make it worth buying the download. Lastly, they have been offering DSD files lately too. Some of those titles cannot be purchased on SACD anymore, so you might have to pay inflated aftermarket prices if you want a physical copy.

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21

an interesting thread over on the Steve Hoffman forum about undownloadable Qobuz purchasesā€¦

Gist is that one might pay for a Qobuz album where it is assumed you get the entire album, but then you get a download page where a number of the tracks are shown as unavailable or not downloadable. (And this is not clear before you pay for it.)

Anyway, not sure anyone here has experienced it, but it seemed relevant to the discussion.