The difference between Qoboz stream vs purchased songs

"Streaming cannot do this.  Streaming must keep up with the music so streaming always has error management tool that interpolates for any missing bit and moves on"

Depends on the protocol in use.   Certainly UDP by itself can lose packets and so loss has to be accounted for at the application level.  But this is not how data streaming is done these days (and hasn't for some time).

Today, we use RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) or SCTP (Stream Control Transport Protocol) which provides a true IP connection allowing error handling at the network layer, so you rarely lose packets unless your ISP is having an issue.   These protocols even support play, stop, and pause.   SCTP is preferred because it actually breaks the stream into chunks of data and will provide network level error correction, and thus is superior because the packets delivered will be a faithful to the data sent.

To reiterate, if you're having trouble with data retransmission, it's an ISP problem and you can spend an 6 figures in getting the most sophisticated networking gear in your house and will have no impact if your ISP has a problem (or the internet itself is having a problem).

If you think you're having a data issue; before you spend money on cables, special switches and routers, hire a local communication company that can check if you're having packet loss.  It will cost you a lot less than buying new network hear and you'll have data to based your decision on.  

@fredrik222  That's good information; I know some of the early services did that, and I know spotify does this as well.  I was curious if you download a 192/24 flac that fast, so I did some back-of-the-envelope calculation.

From the article, 192 kHz/24-bit music they allocate 41.9 MB/minute.

Looking through my library, a typical FLAC at 192/24 is about 14 MB for a 5 minute song.

That means that they'll send that song to a user in roughly 3 seconds, assuming the user has sufficient bandwidth.

If you assume a typical home user has a 300 Mb which is (mega Bit) not accounting for the overhead of the IP connection setup that would get you the song in around 3 seconds.   So yes, it's very possible they download first.   I'll have to try that when I get home this evening.

As a pure guess, I think it's likely they're using SCTP because you can let the protocol handle the error correction and breaking the music into chunks.   And then they can start playing as soon as they receive the first chunk of data. This avoids any interpolation of data in the application, and you don't have dropouts waiting for data.

All of this works because music files are tiny, they take almost nothing to move.  It doesn't even stress your internal network.   

It's far more complicated to stream video because we're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in size.

@cleeds 

Interesting.  Do you have any way to share that test?  Because based on what I'm seeing on my own, I don't see an issue with Qobuz;  quite the opposite.

As to the original poster, I have a natural tendency to want to own songs and music I really like.   Yes, I still pay for streaming too, primarily because I like to discover new music (their newsletter is handy for this), and Spotify is great in the car and on my phone because of the vast amount of music available, since the fidelity is more than enough to support listening even on a good car stereo.

Heck, I've gotten into about 4 or 5 musical genres simply because the music is readily available to listen to.

@fredrik222 Interesting thread  It appears Quobuz is using a either a network  protocol or an application technique that will try to dump as much data down initially (which probably works really well for short pop & jazz songs) allowing an instant start of the song and then giving a slower network the time to download the rest while playing the beginning of the song.

For most pop songs, it's seems like that initial chunk may contain the entire song.

It would be interesting to see what happens if he tried to play a long song to see if the data rate stays high even after playing the song starts.

@fredrik222  Yeah, that's why I showed the math.  I surprised myself when I realized that you could literally download a high-definition FLAC from Qobuz in just a few seconds easily.

I use Spotify most of the time since I drive a lot and like to listen to headphones during the day.  However, I use Qobuz when I'm listening on my NAD M33 which has the BluOS built in.  I stream from both my internal network and Quobuz, and you really can't tell the difference between the two in terms of latency or the quality.

And the difference between digital and analog is while you can still argue about the quality of the sound between components (speakers, DAC's etc), digital data in terms of content and timing of data packets can be measured and quantified in a way that gives you something that is directly comparable.