@melvinjames
As a user of Qobuz for over a year now, I listen to music not known to me before 80% of the time. And I hardly listen to any of my about 2,000 CDs anymore. A lot of great music on ECM (of course), but also on ACT.
Pretty much everything by Marcin Wasilewski (and company),
anything by Michael Wollny, Bugge Wesseltoft (incl. Rymden), Michel Benita |
Marilyn Mazur - Celestial Circle, ECM, Qobuz
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@reubent I have ripped all of my CDs, about 2,000 of them, and stored the FLAC files on a 2 TB WD Passport external drive and connected (USB) to the Node 2i. That way I stream from the internet or get the FLACs from the attached disk. Same quality given that the recording is the same. Sometimes Qobuz has remasters of my old CDs, though. I have used Node 2i over 5 GHz WiFi or ethernet cable w/ equal success. |
@big_greg Thank you for Diane Schuur recommendation! Sounds like Paradise (on my new Focal Clears), and exactly the kind of music that makes my day today :-)
There's plenty of air and *soundstage* in addition to the music itself.
I didn't know this singer at all.
Earlier today, I happily listened to "Haydn 2032, Vol. 2 : Il filosofo" (Qobuz HiRes) |
Michel Benita -- Lower the Walls, Qobuz |
@melvinjames You are being closely followed! (by me). Great selections that teach me about wonderful Jazz I oftentimes didn't know!
Myself I am exploring the catalogue of the ACT label these days, including great Norwegian artists. Right now listening to "Closer" by Bertine Zetlitz. |
Rymden -- Live in Umeå (Live)
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Chris Potter "Circuits" / Qobuz HR |
@big_greg The Qobuz playlists are great!
Check out austinpop's playlists (dCS Bartok, etc) plenty of really good music and pointers to records I didn't know |
Paolo Fresu: Alma. Qobuz.
(on my new Focal Clear headphones connected to RME ADI-2 DAC).
Great music, wonderful sound. |
Paolo Fresu: "Alma", ACT, Qobuz HR
Someone made a good suggestion recently, to accompany our de facto recommendations with a few words
Paolo Fresu is my new discovery and I can't stop listening to him. He's a modern Sardinian Jazz trumpeter. Music is similar to that of Nils Petter Molvaer. |
@reubent
Like @big_greg I too prefer Qobuz, sonically Hi-Res is preferable to me over MQA "Masters" -- you can find a lot of discussion on this comparison. A bunch of highly respected makers of DACs don't even support MQA, and explain that they are not going to. That said, sometimes music I am looking for is missing from the Qobuz catalogue, but is available on Tidal.
Where I disagree with @big_greg is that you need something better than Node 2i. In my opinion, you don't. But... Node's internal DAC is indeed very much entry-level. I had used it at first, but then upgraded to RME ADI-2 DAC FS. Now my Node 2i feeds digital signal over optical or coax cable to the RME, and the latter is the sound maker. The solution costs $1,850 in today's list prices, and I don't know why anyone would pay more. |
Bluesound’s (DAC) sound is OK, but underwhelming. That’s why I no longer use it’s internal DAC. External-DAC-wise I think we are at a point where it is difficult to improve things any more (although marketing will try to convince people otherwise). Which is great -- we can concentrate on music itself and stop obsessing about equipment :-) |
@big_greg I am an electronics engineer turned software engineer. In fact, I played a lot with audio (and image) formats. For folks getting into digital music it makes sense to educate themselves about the basics of digital audio: what is PCM, FLAC, etc. On Wikipedia and elsewhere. I don't want to go into voluminous explanations in this forum. It is the DAC that 'makes' the analog 'music' not the streamer etc. The latter can differ on ergonomics, but if it is not broken, and if if feeds the bytes to the DAC, it doesn't matter what it is. There is a lot of misinformation floating around, created by folks who want to sell some 'better' (and more expensive) equipment. @reubent will need to form his own opinion eventually, based in part on input from folks like us, Reddit forums, and best of all -- personal experience. |
Anyone looking at today's new material on Qobuz will notice not one but TWO releases by Paulo Fresu, my favorite Sardinian trumpeter for the last couple of months. He published them to celebrate his 60-th birthday 2 days ago. Please check out his earlier material too. |
@big_greg Thank you for the recommendation, I was going to miss that gem (Alice Coltrane) |
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