I also cancelled my Qobuz subscription. With all of the buzz on this forum about how great Qobuz was/is, I was hoping for a lot more. I personally just didn’t see the value of it. Maybe because I don’t listen to Classical music. Maybe in the future I will give it another try.
Tidal has military and education memberships that discount their streaming. I have 1,000+ hi res albums and 100+ SACD (dsf) albums in my local library with another 500 wav and 500 flac (44.1) albums… of the music I listen to… just did not see the SQ everyone talks about when going CD to CD. So, $10/month for hi res membership is worth the lack of classical and traditional jazz music I don’t listen to. MQA against 24/88 is fine… that leaves 24/96+ music that is minor for the music I listen to. I just wanted to make sure the SQ was equal or I would have canceled Tidal.
HW & SW Configuration:
I was using Roon 1.6 w/ Roon ROCK OS streaming Nucleus+ powered by Sbooster LPS powered by P20; only one application running: Roon server.
I still fully agree with Paul on this one…
Have both Tidal hifi & Qobuz Sublime subscription and only use Tidal for albums not available on Qobuz. Moreover it’s great having the opportunity to buy and download albums at nice discount, and i really like to browse Qobuz’s app with its info and pdf-booklets, meanwhile playing selected music in share with BubbleUPnP.
But each his own, having choices nowadays these are great times for music lovers 
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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.)
Everybody agrees with and likes what they like. That is why we have choices. If Qobuz is to your liken go for it, it Tidal is your thing go for it also.
Clearly everyone has different likes and dislikes.
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I never use other people’s ears to listen to my music… never really pay attention to other peoples views… no matter who they are… God gave me two ears and they work amazing… I trust them more than opinions… reminds me of an old joke when the audiophile got caught cheating on his wife… His response was: “who are you going to believe, your eyes or me…”…
Forgot - I also use my brain to think… it has served me well for years… don’t use other people’s brains to think for me…
It was interesting to see the difference between Qobuz and Tidal at AXPONA this past weekend. All that Tidal could manage was a banner on the mezzanine, and I came across only a couple of rooms still using it. And in past years, I don’t even recall Tidal having a room or a booth, or any sort of presence beyond a banner here or there. Qobuz, on the other hand, appeared in a big way. They had a booth in the marketplace, and their audiophile guru David Solomon was all over the show, doing “flash DJ” appearances in a handful of rooms, where he would play selections from the Qobuz catalog, and talk about the platform and the selection. Qobuz also sponsored most of the show floors (Schiit Audio took the third floor, and Qobuz the rest). I realize it’s their first year being online in the US and they need to make a big impression, but I still expect they will have some sort of presence in future years.
An FYI from the Qobuz folks–they just recently signed on another major distributor, and they are in the process of adding these files to the US selection. (I had inquired about the Mack Avenue Records and HeadsUp/Telarc labels, and these are part of the additions.) We need to keep in mind that Qobuz is having to “back-license” these for US distribution, so it’s not a matter of whether Qobuz “wants” the music–they have to negotiate licensing for what they offer, and it is an ongoing process. They may not have parity with the other streamers in the US yet, but they are working on it.
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For what it’s worth all we played at the show was Qobuz streamed into DirectStream. Amazing sound.
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Indeed–it sounded fantastic!
I always wondered if exhibitors had a backup plan in case the hotel’s network went down, or Qobuz had streaming issues.
I don’t know about others, but we planned ahead - all demo tracks were downloaded for offline play 
With that said, we had zero issues when we went rogue and started streaming tracks.
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I am paying $5.00 per month for TIDAL HiFi currently through this deal with Third Man Records. While I am interested in experiencing Qobuz, and I may do so on a 30-day free trial, it would have to be really spectacular for me to spend an additional $25.00 per month for high-res streaming.
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Right now Qobuz is in a weird spot for me. Sound quality is a big plus in its favor. It’s my go-to when I want to listen attentively. However, the US catalog still has a long way to go while they re-negotiate all their deals with labels. That’s quite a bummer.
As Rudy pointed out though, they’re continually expanding their catalog so with any luck this won’t be a problem for much longer.
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@Bootzilla - TIDAL military & school discount is also nice. $10/ month for TIDAL or $25/ month for Qobuz is $180/year for more audio stuff. 
I compared TIDAL versus Qobuz for a month and like TIDAL better. CD/CD same SQ and liked the TIDAL library better. The Nucleus+ Roon made the SQ A/B and library comparison easy with the version tab. I like hi res 24/96 versus MQA so Qobuz has it. However, like Scott says, in a year TIDAL will see more conversions.
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I’m using both Tidal and Qobuz through Roon. IMO, Qobuz generally has a distinct edge on sound quality. I also like that the libraries don’t seem to have tons of overlap. High res files definitely sound better on Qobuz on my system.
I am in the same place. I opened a Qobuz trial the first day it was offered to the general public. It soon became apparent the Qobuz library was not yet up to snuff. Too much of what I listen to on a regular basis was missing or only offered as snippets. As for sound quality I found little to choose between Qobuz and Tidal. Perhaps in a year I will give Qobuz another trial.
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I found suspect files in my experience with Tidal, which is why I quit using them. (I may have mentioned this upstream in the thread, but they were known to have compromised files with digital watermarking that gave a weird “underwater” sound to the midrange. And presumably, Universal was one of the labels affected.) I had a few friends with Tidal and higher-end systems notice the same thing on some of Tidal’s streams (I believe @olson_jr mentioned this to me as well, and he has a DS).
I mention this in my upcoming Copper show report. Tidal’s presence was simply a banner on the mezzanine, but Qobuz was all over the place, sponsoring all but one floor, giving flash DJ presentations in a handful of rooms, and many rooms had Qobuz placards showing that they were using the service.
Just as a matter of discussion, though, I don’t really use Qobuz all that much. When I travel, sure, I use it nightly in the hotel room, and it saves me loading USB sticks with tunes, or pulling the USB drive and SD card from my head unit (which does hi-res in the car). At home, though, I primarily listen to my collection, and use Qobuz lightly when I’m discovering other music. I’ve used it when Roon has gone flaky on me, but otherwise, I don’t depend on it much. I could probably cancel it until I need it, in fact.
But the Sublime option is very attractive. That extra $50/year would be a good enticement to add to my hi-res collection and save money. I figured I would break even after the equivalent of six or seven full priced purchases, and the rest would be 50% off. I can think of a dozen albums from one artist alone that I would like to purchase.
I figure I’ll wait for Qobuz to catch up. I’ve been on this planet for decades, and didn’t have streaming for all but the last few, so waiting another year or more isn’t going to kill me.
I got one of my questions answered by a Qobuz rep. The answer was wait a couple of weeks to sign up for a US account and cancel the French one first as the US library would be significantly better then
Mark.
Years ago the DS/BridgeII combo offered me the opportunity to stream in high quality for the very first time. At that time Qobuz wasn’t available over here and just simply was trying to survive.
Short after Xandrie SA took over and injected substantial $$. With a share capital of € 6.676.548 (a relative small company in this industry) Xandrie SA kept on developing the Qobuz web/app interface, expanding their catalog, offered streaming in native HiRes and opens up to more countries (eventually even abroad to conquer the US ;-).
Delivering top-notch quality, selling native high-res at great discount (Sublime+), stable as a rock and IMHO surpassing Tidal by miles both in SQ and intuitive interface with it’s background info & pdf-booklet/inlays the Qobuz concept really deserves to survive. That’s why i started this topic anyways…
I ended up with a €299,99/year Qobuz Sublime+ and a monthly €20,- Tidal hifi subscription (only in use for albums not available on Qobuz…). Yep that’s a lot of money. But in the old days i spent more $$ overall because the only way to get access to our beloved music was to buy it. Very happy nowadays having access to huge daily growing catalogs without the need to buy all.
It’s all about the music 
++
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After reading everything that has been written on the PSA forum for the last year about these two, I have no favorite for sound quality. So, I hope Tidal and Qobuz both do well in the USA and their competition will help our ears in the future.
My experience with Roon/Tidal (I expect some feed back here) after 5 months of basic and 2 months of lossless Tidal, I cut back to the basic subscription. I don’t notice the difference, yeah maybe on a few tracks. I think my BHK Pre and DS DAC Sr with
a Sonore UltraRendu make a good difference; but I can’t prove, only enjoy. I haven’t tried Qobuz but will.
I am only reporting, not supporting either service, or trying to sell something. Many thanks to all contributors to this thread.
Chas
My observation in support of this fabulous thread is, When I think that there are only, what, 6 to 12, high end music streaming services in the world. It makes deciding easier for me, compared to trying to decide on a preamps, DAC, speakers etc. there must be thousands of those, not counting the used market (I purposely omit cables in this list 
).
Keep those opines coming,
Chas