Minimum Broadband Speed Necessary For Uninterrupted Qobuz and/or Tidal Listening?


I live in a sparsely populated rural area with only a few Internet providers. I currently have 25Mb DSL from CenturyLink (previously Sprint landline) and I subscribe to both Qobuz and Tidal. My actual DSL speed varies from about 18Mb up to 25Mb and this can vary during the day. My hardware includes a Bluesound Node 2i connected by a short Ethernet cable (Not using a wireless connection) to my CenturyLink DSL router.

I can rarely listen for more than 20 minutes or so without experiencing what I would deem dropouts in either the Qobuz or Tidal music stream, or the stream will simply freeze and I have to hit the “play” icon to re-start the music stream. I do seem to suffer a few more problems listening to Qobuz than Tidal, and I attribute this to Qobuz’s multiple higher resolution offerings (higher resolution than Redbook CD) vs, the MQA offerings from Tidal which I believe use a bit less bandwidth than Quobuz’s higher resolution offerings.

I recently started listening to the four lossless radio streams with MQA encoding now offered by Radio Paradise, and interestingly enough I DO NOT have these dropouts and/or music freezes with the Radio Paradise streams. And the MQA feeds from Radio Paradise are always glitch-free compared to Tidal and Qobuz.

These dropouts/freezes suggest my CenturyLink 25Mb DSL speed is not enough for either Qobuz and Tidal and that I need to purchase more bandwidth. 25Mb is CenturyLink’s maximum speed in my area, but I can get fibre connectivity in increments ranging from 45Mb up to 1Gb and cable connectivity in increments ranging from 50Mb up to 1,5Gb, and StarLink satellite service from Space X at 70Mb ($100/month, no data cap) plus $600 for satellite equipment is now available in my area.

I’m interested in your thoughts regarding the minimum broadband speed I need, and whether I should select cable or fibre to upgrade to?
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Showing 1 response by bkeske

18-25 is more than enough. You can stream most higher def video with 10-14 easily, which requires more than simply audio. Now, that said, how many are using the WiFi in your home at one time? If you are running 3-5 streaming services at once, then yes, it’s possible you can run into issues, as that 18-25 is being shared by more than one device.

Thus, if your only streaming one or two devices, and the internet is dropping, it may be another issue other than speed.

it’s easy to get sucked into ‘I need more speed’ and pay an exorbitant amount for something you don’t require. But as I say, if you have a house full of people all streaming various devices at once, then you may have to consider speed. I learned and reduced my speed by a third, but I am in my home alone, and only streaming from one or devices at a time, max.