Qobuz or Tidal?


Qobuz or Tidal? And why?

Aurender, good DAC, no MQA. US.
jaybe

If you like to play your music directly from FLAC files and buy high definition tracks at a great price, Qobuz will be for you. If you want to try streaming music in MQA format and discover new hip-hop songs every day, Tidal would be a good choice.

In my opinion, both have their strengths and weaknesses, but the winner really depends on the user's preferences and the songs they play. I'm a big fan of Tidal MQA and will often use Tidal Music Downloader to download my favorite Tidal music locally without the costly subscription fee.

Was using Tidal for a couple of years. Have since switched to Qobuz. It's noticeably better. Not a great fan of MQA.

Like the increasing Hi Res titles as well.

I have gone through probably 4-5 rounds of comparisons. Each time find Qobuz is better. Tidal is muddier for me. In fact, I’m trying Tidal again right now with Roon, cancelled my Tidal within a day and just disabled Tidal in Roon because for some reason Roon seems to pick Tidal over Qobuz. 

I always choose Qobuz over Tidal in Roon if possible. I maintain a Tidal subscription for redundancy; occasionally Qobuz will not have a track or album but Tidal will. I downgraded my Tidal plan to the base option as it now has redbook quality. Happy to do that as I do not trust nor want MQA, and it saves me money. A big advantage of Qobuz is that all hi-res files are packaged in FLAC.

Even Spotify Premium sounds better to me than Tidal even with a proper MQA unfold.

My subjective impressions of the musicality and sound quality of the major HD streaming services: (as of November 2020)
1. Qobuz
2. Primephonic
3. Spotify Premium (320 kbps Ogg Vorbis which is not lossless)
4. IDAGIO
5. Amazon HD
6 Tidal