In Praise of Qobuz

Well…what I find obtrusive is if I select an artist and click on an album to peruse and then want to go back to look at a different album, I click the upper left back arrow and it takes me back to the beginning A’s of my artists. That’s a pain to scroll through the alphabet again.

Used Tidal for years, downloading to phone and enjoying on my commute. I recall Naim guy (sorry forgotten his name) in the Classic series YouTube video saying Qobuz was much much better. Have to agree now with Qobuz subscription and hires very good. Also their catalogue choice appears more “mature”, so listening to their playlist choices always enjoyable

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This is one of the areas where Spotify surpasses Qobuz - discography available by release date. Shouldn’t be that hard for Qobuz to replicate, should it?

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You wouldn’t think so would you!
Listening to good quality music has become so much more accessible but so much more of a mental test at the same time.
That’s before Roon, minimserver and NAS. Life was simpler when the choice was lp or cassette🤣

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And their auto play (which is brand new on desktop) is also an awesome selection…awesome.


Lol…this is on now…what fun…

It is chronological on the desktop Qobuz version. I would guess an improvement is coming.

I use Qobuz and Tidal side by side. I’m in the process of moving over to Qobuz completely due to Tidal forcing MQA down our throats.

But a few months down the line, I run into more downsides from Qobuz than I thought. There are more titles/releases not available on Q than I expected. There’s also no ‘Qobuz Connect’ like Tidal to run it from a desktop/laptop. I use this a lot to explore new music and while I’m working. Chromecast is so so at best imo.

I’m also not hearing consistent better SQ from Qobuz over from Tidal. If anything, it’s pretty much back & forth between the two. And last, I think the desktop app from Tidal is a lot better than from Qobuz.

So I’m kind of reconsidering my plan to move away Tidal to Qobuz to be honest. :roll_eyes:

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I have both (and Apple Music).

I want to support Qobuz, but sometimes I think they try to do too much, you only have to look at the magazine/review/blog content on their website to appreciate this is stuff others don’t do and is added value, but customers want a flawless service with reliable apps foremost I believe.

Tidal will have vast resources compared to Qobuz as they were launched with select popular artists onboard.

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It annoys me that Qobuz is a complete mess in this respect. The albums list doesn’t even contain just albums, it’s usually a dog’s dinner of albums, EPs and singles all jumbled up together. Fortunately Roon separates them out so that when you browse albums, you see a list of albums.

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Agree - having been a long time Spotify user that recently moved to Qobuz, it was a real challenge to accept the compromises that come with Qobuz (no “connect” implementation, poor search results, album lists that mix songs with albums, random album ordering, lack of play/popularity data, missing music, limited playlists, poor recommendations etc.) In fact, the only thing going for Qobuz is SQ and a tendency to weed out some of the mainstream crap that seems to permeate Spotify. I worry for Qobuz if Spotify ever get their act together and deliver hi-res…

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Yep

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That’s odd, I haven’t noticed and I’m able to navigate artists and catalogues so much easier than Tidal now. I didn’t realize it’s all fubard.

SQ aside, Qobuz needs to be where Spotify is as a streaming service, which would be ideal.

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I would like to see Qobuz with the Tidal or Spotify “Connect” technology so that I can stream directly from the Google cloud servers.

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Hi I am an Android user and sadly I have never got the off line library to work for me. I have used Qobuz for about three years and use off line quite a bit and with several devices but never worked very well for me. After a number of tracks Qobuz stops playing and then you can restart and lo it stops again a bit later on.
My thinking it is ‘calling’ for verification from Google Play but cannot get it as it is off line. Qobuz support have never really got to the bottom of this and generally end up saying it will be resolved with next update.
I have resisted Tidal as I prefer Qobuz but am going to switch now as Tidal off line works well.

For me sound quality is the most important factor in deciding which streaming service to use - hopefully features in the Naim app will be improved, session history and retaining sort order would be a great start.
Don’t have too much trouble finding the music I like on Qobuz, do agree that the metadata needs attention though.
Soon as you listen to a track you know you’ve made the right decision.

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I am a long-time user of Spotify (Premium account), but having recently acquired an NDX 2, I decided to try Quobuz (Tidal isn’t available in the Channel Islands, would you believe!).

The sound quality improvement over Spotify 320Kbs is immediately noticeable. I don’t find searching for things on Qobuz too onerous and I was gratified to see that recordings of some pretty obscure classical composers are available.

The ability to buy downloads is also great. I am currently on a free trial of Qobuz, which expires on January 22nd. I am intending to subscribe to the Sublime option. It may cost more than the standard subscription, but the Hi-Res downloads are around half the price they are with the standard one.

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Go for it. I have never regretted taking out a Qobuz subscription when I first got a streamer that would play it natively. I use it as a supplement to my local music store, about 50-50 I would say. It has its idiosyncrasies, but I think it is great VFM particularly for classical, so I’m happy to put up with those.

One label which you won’t find on Qobuz, or any streaming service come to that, is Hyperion which has some, to me, indispensable classical discs. But I just buy the downloads (which tend to have excellent metadata) and add them to the local store.

Roger

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I have experienced the same problem with the Android version running on an Astell & Kern portable music player.

It’s fine with just a few downloaded items but get above a certain threshold - for me about 100GB - and it can take over 5 minutes to load everything and be ready to play anything.

I have nearly a year of email correspondence with Qobuz support on this but no resolution as yet.

Steve

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That was probably the threshold on iPhone X with over 100GB of audio downloaded.

I need to pare the downloads back a bit anyway, as I rarely use the much older downloads on there.