Amazon music vs Qobuz

Hard for me to believe an actual streamer could sound better
 

@robshaw Believe it — it’s a real thing.  Your computer is very noisy, and although you won’t hear actual noise per se, the music quality suffers a lot, which you might not notice until you use a decent streamer.  The difference is not small, and I’d strongly encourage you to at least demo a streamer in your system to see what you’re missing.  I was skeptical too until I added a streamer, but there’s absolutely no going back.  I control my music through Qobuz on my iPad or iPhone — easy peasy and no computer necessary.  Just my $0.02 FWIW. 

@robshaw Goodonya for keeping an open mind on this, and you’ll be richly rewarded for any effort you make toward getting a separate streamer. BTW, totally agree with you on Qobuz, and I prefer the Amazon interface too but not at the expense of sound quality. Also, great choice on the Fritz speakers and not surprised you’re very impressed with them (maybe @erik_squires was the helpful member who recommended them?).

So, to answer your questions, I run Qobuz on my iPad/iPhone wirelessly through my iFi Zen Stream streamer. The Zen Stream doesn’t link directly to Qobuz (yet) so I spent $6 on an MConnectHD app that has an interface somewhat similar to the Qobuz site. The streamer can work over Wi-Fi, but it has issues with that so I’m going to use an Ethernet cable to get around that and will likely sound better as well. Since my router isn’t near my stereo I’m gonna use a TP-Link Wi-Fi extender (that plugs into an outlet) and run an Ethernet cable from that to my streamer. Then you just use whatever digital connection that works from the streamer to your DAC and you’re all set. Sorry for the long-winded reply but hope it helps.

@robshaw Heh heh.  I hear ya and I have little patients for tech snafus myself.  If you don’t like the Qobuz interface you ain’t gonna like MConnectHD any better, but I find it at least serviceable.  At $399 the ZS provides a lot of sound quality for the price, and if you go hard wired as I mentioned you shouldn’t have any problem.  But, there are other options out there that may work great for you.  Again, best of luck. 

Your I phone in my case has to download and IFI app and the you would stream your qobuz app for song listings??? Pretty close?

@robshaw I guess you could do it that way, but I just went to the iFi website and enabled the connection there. Sorry, it’s been a while since I did it and my memory for these things is not so good. You would then run your music exclusively through the MConnectHD app. It worked well until I ran into Wi-Fi issues, which is why I’m going hard wired. I do really love the sound quality of the Zen Stream and it actually sounds better than spinning CDs, which is why I’m sticking with it despite their poor customer support and Wi-Fi issues.

@tgilb Steve Stone did a comparison of several streaming services I think on The Absolute Sound a couple years ago and found Amazon to be sub par compared to Qobuz and others.  I prefer the AMZN interface, but as sound quality is my priority I stick with Qobuz.  I’d suggest doing a free trial and see what you think. Lots of hi-res stuff along with CD-quality content.