Now that Roon integrates with Qobuz in addition to Tidal, has anyone compared the two services thru the DSJ? Since the DSJ upsamples all files I’m interested to know if starting out with a higher rez file makes a noticeable different in sound quality?
hi @slefley,
the ability to notice the difference on hi res files is very much dependent on the quality of the other components in your system. without knowing al of the other components it is hard to say so i will share the specs of my system when i purchased the dsjr and my experience.
at the time i purchased the dsjr, i had it connected to a yamaha aventage 1020 receiver via the analog rca connectors usng rca pro interconnects from almost 20 yeasr ago. the speakers i was using at the time were paradigm monitor 11 v5 connected with monster xp pro 12 gauge speaker wire.
On that system i was very easily able to tell the difference between compressed (mp3,aac,etc) audio files (no pun intended) and uncompressed (flac, dsd, mqa) files. When a compressed file came on, I could immediately tell that the file was compressed and found myself reaching for the remote to skip the file. At that time, most of my files were compressed rips of cds that i owned. Noticing this i spent the next couple of weekends re=ripping all of my cd’s to flac.
With respect to streaming from tidal or qobuz, for the compressed files that I owned and did not have the CD (amazon an itunes purchases), i found that i much preferred the Tidal MQA or CD version of the file and would change the default version in roon to the online uncompressed version of the file.
Lastly, comparing tidal to qobuz, i found that i prefer the sound of tidal over qobuz on my system. Your tastes may be different though, so i recommend that you try both and subscribe to the one that you like better. One thing you might also want to consider in your decision is that tidal has more files than qobuz, and it costs less per month for the top of the line subscription.
good luck in your journey.