Qobuz vs Airplay

Over the years, I've tried them all and Qobuz turned out to be the absolute best, then Tidal.  I stream all Qobuz, unless an album is only available on Tidal.  If you want the absolute best sound quality that any streaming service has to offer, then you'll have to go with Qobuz.  Happy listening.   

I have tried both Tidal and Qobuz using my Aurender X100L music streamer connected via USB audio to a Oppo BDP 105. I can safely say that Qobuz does sound very good (the best) but Tidal has a way better selection and a lot if not the majority of the music is available at Studio quality and the rest is CD quality sound which is a slight compromise in my opinion, Tidal is the best of both worlds ,selection/SQ. Go with Tidal. 

And YES do not Airplay anything. 

@badger_erich 

+1

Overall, really appreciate this discussion. I tend to think that I’m a 2-channel analog guy. That’s where my time and investment have been. It’s been a great experience. I think I have a pretty good system, etc.

But over the past few years, I’ve done a lot more simple streaming over my devices. I’ve gone back-and-forth on getting into headphones and explored “desktop” near-field systems. It’s been eye opening. 

I think this is where the real action is. It seems to me there’s (way) more innovation in this broad space of digital. Importantly, I don’t think you need to spend a small fortune to get high satisfaction out of it. Those two things (innovation, less expensive) are going to drive music/audio/experience. 

I’m not trying to derail this convo. Again, appreciate the insights on the main topic.

John Darko did a deep dive into Airplay a few months ago. It is lossy. At best it provides 320Kbps .aac files and often goes to less than that depending on how close you are and other factors. A very long time ago when Airplay first came out, it wasn’t lossy, but upon realizing that it was killing the iPhones’ batteries quickly they changed it to be lossy so the amount of data being transferred is far less. It also now sends data in short bursts and is buffered, not continuous, to free up the bandwidth for any other tasks needing attention.

They should have called it "Airplay 2" but didn’t, hence the confusion on some people’s part.  I’d opt for Qobuz over Wi-Fi every time. Airplay isn’t even as good as LDAC Bluetooth.  But hey, for convenience, and not critical listening, why not use whatever is easiest for you? I use Airplay via an iPAD to stream music from webpages, such as the Internet Live Music Archive to my streamer. Works fine.