FWIW after a month-long comparison between these two services with the type of music I enjoy and the system I have Qobuz was the clear winner for me. This applied for both my Bluesound Node 2 and Audirvana w/ SMS 200.
What happens if Netflix or Hulu launches a lossless music streaming service as a $5 add-on to video?
Would it just drive Amazon and Apple to lower their prices?
How easy is it for a company like Spotify to increase its streaming capacity from 320kbps to hi res? With more than 300 million accounts, methinks, they’d need a much larger server farm not to mention streaming capacity!
Interesting question.
My guess is they already have the music stored in a higher resolution format and down sample to 320kbps as they stream the music to a user. But they would still need increased bandwidth.
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But, those who use Tidal or Qobuz are very aware of the big three. I have read many state that once Apple is up, running and settled in with lossless, they will jump ship. Only time will tell, though.
What people say and what they do are often very different things.
My response is not scientific, but I noticed that when Apple and MS roll out updates, they stagger them, and MS takes advantage (with the consent of) users’ peer download / upload. This tells me, serving larger files implies more server drives at work at the same time as opposed to pure storage.
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I re-signed up with Tidal because they offered 20% to rejoin, and I was pleasantly surprised how good the music sounded now compared to a couple of years ago. I’ll keep it for sure.
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I have been using Qobuz for the last few years and have been very pleased. If you are a Roon user, Qobuz integration is seamless. If you are a Sublime level subscriber you get substantial discount on download purchased. Just recently Qobuz has begun offering DSD offerings for purchase too.
Qobuz is great and I have a sublime account so the downloads are an added bonus. However there is some electronica that I can only find on Tidal so I keep both. In addition I can use Tidal within my dj software whereas I cant with Qobuz.
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Tidal dropped MQA. Many people hate MQA.
