After much faffing about (a lot, really a lot) and having tried trials of the above services, plus Amazon and Apple, this week I decided to subscribe to Qobuz.
In the end I chose Qobuz because to me it sounds better.
However the conversations I was haing with myself included cost, I already had access to Amazon music, was on an extend trial of Apple. Both were cheaper but I just feel they corner the market in many ways.
Another conversation was, I like having CDs (& occassional vinyl) even though I generally rip them and put them on a shelf.
A further bit was having over £200 worth of music on my Amazon watch list and thinking if I buy that music, well I could easily subscribe to Qobuz.
I do worry about artists income, so certain ones I will continue to buy physical formats, but it is one of the many conundrums that I played with before eventually settling on a service.
One thing I hadn’t realised until joining one, is that on the various free trials I never used the many options, like creating playlists. I just listened to music, but now any music I fancy can go in a playlist. If I end up listening to anything a lot then I can buy it…just in case Qobuz stops having it on their service.
Already I feel very happy with Qobuz. I stream to my Unitilite via an airport express or Mconnect, all seems to work well, but here I am sitting enjoying P!nk (All I know so far) on my Meze Classic 99s via Macbook and Saturday is feeling OK so far…have a good day everyone.
Hi… you don’t say how you are connecting your NDX2… and what your broadband speed is.
The new streamers, such as the NDX2, are stable with CDN delivery unlike the Naim first gen streamers which could could suffer from latency based dropouts. (CDNs are the method of distributed cloud based media / streaming servers, that share loads around the globe… companies like Tidal and Qobuz buy space and capacity from the CDN providers… as opposed to using their own servers)
Do remember Qobuz can have higher bandwidth media compared to Tidal … unless you limit in Qobuz settings, where as Tidal for lossless is bandwidth constrained to just 44.1/16/2 … so depending on broadband bandwidth or if using wifi, you might be starving your NDX2 of data… hence drop outs with Qobuz.
Hi @Simon-in-Suffolk, my NDX 2 is directly connected to my router and my broadband is poor 7-8 Mbps according to fast.com. I’m aware that my connection is far from ideal with Qobuz, but shouldn’t the long buffer solve the problem? This is the part that I don’t really understand (as I set it around 25-30s). I still experience dropouts.
I had that suspect about Qobuz higher bandwith. I didn’t know the exact Tidal bandwith and what you said does explain with I normally experience no problems with 44.1/16. The higher the sampling rate, the harder it seems to have a smooth playback.
Hi yes that is more than ample in terms of bandwidth for 44.1/16/2 - but will be progressively challenged with higher sample rates (ie drop outs) - which will be exacerbated if there is an issue with your broadband provider and their backhaul/peering with the certain CDNs or you have another heavy user on your broadband at the same time.
Based on you setting the buffer length, and on what I recall from other posts by you, I think that you are streaming Qobuz from the webplayer in the browser on the computer, correct?
If yes, be aware that this is very different to using the Naim app and letting the streamer fetch the data directly:
When streaming through the browser, the data actually goes through the browser, so if the computer is on wifi there is an additional limitation regardless of the NDX2 being wired.
The buffering is also done by the browser. Note that 20-30 seconds is a shorter buffer time than the NDX2 would have when streaming directly (which is several minutes).
As the computer is involved, any other performance issues on the computer could have an effect.
Not sure if Blacknote means megabytes or megabits. A broadband with just 7-8 megabits, i.e barely one megabyte per second, seems grotesquely slow, I don’t know of any broadband service even selling plans that are that slow. The slowest and cheapest I can find on offer online is 16 Mbit
And uncompressed 16/44 in stereo is 1411 kbps, shouldn’t it be approx 700 kbps with typical flac compression rates?
When I first got into external music streaming with Tidal, I was able to get a more or less flawless service with a less than 4 Mbps broadband connection. I now have a 75 Mbps or thereabouts connection, but I really don’t recall any problems in those early days.
An 8 Mbps connection should be more than adequate!
No that would be fine… 44.1/16/2 compressed in FLAC is going to hover around 1
1.1 to 1.3 Mbps with overheads so a 7 to 8 Mbps broadband speed will be fine in terms of overall throughput. … CD Redbook is just over 1.4Mbps
I successfully used a 3.6 Mbps broadband link to support 44.1/16/2 FLAC, although down there it was sensitive to anything else other than trivial web or email traffic occurring on the link.
Yes it depends on what happens in the music, when there is a lot going on the bitrate moves up. So while on average it would be around 700kbs, if there is a longer section with a lot of information it could be 1000-1200 for a longer period of time. This would then be the moments where you would experience dropouts with an 8mbit connection…
Well yeah, but the buffer is supposed to smooth this a bit. And even at worst it is still maybe 1.2 Mbit/s and Blacknote seems to have 7-8 (if that’s even the case). Of course, his link could not be just extremely slow on average but also fluctuate a lot
Thanks, I was just thinking about doing this So I still don’t get what kind of “broadband” this is supposed to be, even mobile 3G DC-HSPA+ reaches a typical average of 8 Mbit.
But in any case, I agree with Simon and others that it should suffice, Netflix recommends 5 Mbit for HD …
It is probably standard ADSL, it’s still quite common. If you are located more than about 1500 meters / 1 mile from the nearest relay station that is usually the maximum you can reach.
That’s different, Netflix lowers the bitrate of the video when needed, like Youtube does as well. When the connection drops so does the video quality, since it’s a lossy stream. But with FLAC this is not possible since it’s lossless.
Yes but HD video is also a lot more data even compressed. And of course you see it when it gets dropped too much.
Can we agree that “broadband” delivering 8 Mbit/s should be able to sustain a max 1.2 Mbit/s data rate unless it’s not just this unusually slow but also has large variability and latency?
8Mbps (8 Mbit = 1000 Kilobytes) is barely enough to playback FLAC under perfect circumstances, but as soon as something happens you will have dropouts. This could mean someone else on the network doing anything, or even a mobile phone getting an email. It’s really not enough for a steady 16/44 FLAC playback.
So I still don’t get what kind of “broadband” this is supposed to be, even mobile 3G DC-HSPA+ reaches a typical average of 8 Mbit.