Qobuz or Tidal?


Qobuz or Tidal? And why?

Aurender, good DAC, no MQA. US.
jaybe

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

I started with Qobuz a couple of years ago but decided to add Tidal because some titles were missing in Qobuz.

If you can afford it better to have both IMO.

I mostly do streaming with a Roon Rock NUC and HQPlayer core.