Will, I’m sorry to hear of your medical issue.
I have subscriptions to Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz. I listed them below in terms of how much I listen to each:
- Qobuz
- Spotify
- Pandora
- Tidal
I do most of my "critical" listening with Qobuz.
Spotify doesn’t have the greatest sound quality, but does an amazing job of picking music out for me with its "Your Daily Mix" selections. I listen to it when getting ready for work and in the car.
Pandora has some stations that I like for working out. Sound quality isn’t horrible, but noticeably worse if you listen closely, which I don’t while I’m working out.
The only reason I keep Tidal is that it has a bigger library than Qobuz. I have DACs that do MQA and some that don’t. The sound quality of Qobuz’ hi-res selections through both my non-MQA and MQA DACs is excellent and doesn’t leave me wanting in any way.
I won’t get into the whole MQA thing other than to say that I don’t having to limit my equipment choices in order to get the full monty with MQA. Of course if you’re going to listen to hi-res music you need a DAC that will support the higher bit rates offered. MQA sounds different. Perhaps "better" than a hi-res file, perhaps not. I’ll leave it at that.
To me what matters more than the bit-rate is how well it was recorded in the first place. There’s a lot of music that sounds amazing as a standard FLAC file and there's a lot of music that's hi-res that sounds "meh" to me.
Tidal does have a pretty good engine for creating playlists based on your listening habits. Not as good as Spotify, but this is one feature Qobuz lacks that I would like to see them add.
Tidal seems to focus on a younger demographic with a focus on rap, soul, and hip-hop, while Qobuz seems to target a more mature (older) audience, with a lot more alt/indie, rock, classical, and jazz on their landing page.
