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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 edcyn

edcyn
1,876 posts
 
@vinyl_rules
I have a similar problem with Qobuz. It also happens, though less so, with my Primephonic subscription. I can stream CD quality just fine but when I switch to hi-def, a good 80% of the time it either simply won't load up or it'll stop running after about a tenth of a second. Qobuz puts the blame on me while my streamer maker (Mytek) blames Qobuz.  One of them (I think Qobuz) asked for, and got from me, an analysis of my internet speed. That party has not gotten back to me...which means my internet speed is probably up to snuff. Anyway, it now only happens less than 50% of the time so I think somebody's working on the problem. Meantime, when it happens I just revert to CD quality and suffer mightily (it still sounds pretty damn good...if a fair amount less good).
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