Tidal FLAC vs. Qobuz


Does the recent change by Tidal, from MQA to FLAC make Tidal the better choice for streaming?  Or, since Tidal only seems to offer FLAC on its own app and not the BluOS defeat the purpose since you need to transmit by Bluetooth instead of ethernet?  

Currently, I stream from Tidal over direct ethernet cable to a Bluesound Vault streamer, to a McIntosh amp and Revel speakers.  I have a trial membership to  Qobuz but I find Tidal has a much better catalog.  Since Tidal added Flac I thought it would be the obvious choice moving forward, but isn't the point of FLAC defeated since you need to send wirelessly from the Tidal app over Bluetooth?

mojo771

Showing 3 responses by p05129

I converted from tidal to Qobuz earlier this year. I still think MQA sounded better than flax on Qobuz. I also think that tidal has more music that I like: prog rock, jazz, blues, rock, jazz. I used the free program when I went to Qobuz that used my Roon database entries (ripped and tidal) and loaded all the Qobuz songs into Roon that I had in tidal. After this, I received “unavailable” errors next to many Qobuz songs that means the artist restricted these songs in Qobuz, but tidal did t have these restrictions. 1 album with 9 songs had 5 that were “unavailable”. 
If the Best Buy/tidal fiasco wouldn’t have occurred, I would still be with tidal.

It’s been a while since I did this. When I signed up for Qobuz, Qobuz asked if I needed to convert from tidal and when I said yes, they gave me access to this program. I’ll see if I can find this program.

I used to be with tidal and loved it with MQA. Tidal also has more of the newer music (jazz, blues, prog rock, hard rock, new age) than Qobuz. But the BB/tidal fiasco sent me over to Qobuz. After converting all of my music over, I have some albums on Qobuz that have multiple tracks that are “unavailable” which can’t be played. The description for this is that the artist put a restriction that these songs could not be streamed thru Qobuz, but I streamed these just fine with tidal. So now I have to purchase these albums. The jury is still out on qobuz