I can’t remember if I posted here in the past few months, but I’ve had Qobuz since its US debut (I got on during the beta period), and so far it’s been really good. And I do agree with Paul–I’ve heard some really suspect files on Tidal that make me want to avoid it. It is known that some of their music files have digital watermarking. This is easy to tell since the midrange has sort of a strange garbled “underwater” sheen to it.
It finally hit me when I played one track I was very familiar with. I spent half an hour trying to debug my computer’s audio setup when I realized it was Tidal’s source file. (I even “ripped” the digital stream via a loopback and saved it as a WAV file, so I could share it with others.) I had read that these compromised files were largely from Universal Music, and that they were aware of it and allegedly, “corrected” files were going to be supplied to Tidal.
Why take the chance, though? A few things sounded weird to me over the months I had Tidal, and I’ve never heard this issue on Qobuz. Through my DS Jr. (via Roon), a 24/88.2 download on my NAS sounds the same as the album streamed from Qobuz.
Their catalog is still lacking, but not by so much that I’d ever consider Tidal. Deezer? Maybe, if Roon supported it. Not high-res, but it’s still lossless, and I didn’t have issues with them either. Tidal’s native search capabilities are also truly awful, recalling maybe a third or half, at most, of any artist I’ve ever searched. Many times, I have to search on an album title or an individual track in order to find an album I know they have.
(And the nice side benefit is being free of the rubbish that is MQA.)