As per title, I’ve just handed Qobuz €300 and have spent the past few hours looking at their editorial content and their store and finding HiRes gems like this…
I’m keeping Tidal also at least for the moment as there does seem to be gaps between the 2 services and as I’ve said before it’s still remarkable value - €500/ year €42/month for 75% (?) of the music currently available in the world!
.sjb
Sloop John B
Can you explain how you are doing this? What streamer/etc are you using. Looks like you are using Roon. The ND555 does not do MQA, so is Qobuz thru Chromecast? I have Tidal and would like to stream in HiRez. Tidal are doing that thru Masters, but not sure the ND555 will do it in Hi Rez?
Thanks
Bailyhill
Enjoying this, using the Qobuz website to hone in on some record labels - ACE in this case-
and now listening to
.sjb
Roon now has Qobuz as well as Tidal streaming and as you know the new Naim streamers are Roon compatible. Roon do a 14 day and Qobuz a month free trial, well worth trialling.
.sjb
Just wondering if Roon gives you better SQ? I’ve found it sounds slightly worse with Roon in the signal path.
I am in my first month’s trial and I’ve been thinking about doing the same thing (forking over the money for a Sublime subscription). Qobuz is still in beta in the States and they state up front that they know there are gaps in their catalog but that will likely improve dramatically post beta period. I’d be interested to hear how often you end up buying hi res tracks and how you think they compare to CD rips. I plan to keep Tidal for the foreseeable future and will likely keep both services.
Enjoy!
To be honest I’ve nothing to compare it with, I’ve been using Roon now for 3 years and back then I was comparing it to to a CD555. @Simon-in-Suffolk probably can give you a better idea of Roon’s sound vs Naim streaming.
.sjb
Thanks John, I am now having Roon on trial, I love Roon and I want Roon to succeed. However, the SQ issue is a real stumbling block me - I have tried various tests - with Roon DSP, headroom management, parametric EQ, upsampling, DSD, straight through with DSP disabled, I have found that Roon always sounds worse with varying degrees depending on the settings.
Please note that I have no problem with Roon regarding the computing resources, I am running the Roon Server on a dedicated headless Mac Mini with 16 GB RAM, 4-core i5 2012, and I see that the CPU still has lot of headroom with ~85 % CPU idle even with the DSP 128 conversion.
With local streaming although Roon RAAT sounds ever so slightly different on a Naim streamer to UPnP I think in the balance it’s hard to say one sounds better than the other… just slightly different… no doubt due to the Naim streamer software.
However when it comes to Tidal, then the nod very much goes to Roon, and effectively Roon makes local and remote media effectively sound equivalent… now that is a big break through.
Roon also can offer Qobuz as well now.
I “finally” got my Quboz invite. I’m looking forward to hearing/seeing the Roon integration with Qobuz. I’m with @Sloop_John_B I’ve been using Roon for years and can’t give an accurate comparison anymore.(Roon vs UPnP).