Amazon music vs Qobuz


I’m currently using Qobuz for streaming music. Amazon music is considerably less than Qobuz but I’m wondering what the differences are. Amazon goes on and on about commercial free music. Which makes me wonder how much is commercial free. Qobuz is 100% commercial free. 

z32kerber

SoniclyQobuz is the best, and has a bunch of hires stuff, not as many masters as I would like but  that may be an option in the future .HQplayer  is a excellent program

to take any well built audio computer to-the next level  you need a dedicated SS drive and plenty of Ram  ,but it has tons of flexibility and Roon already has it built into it your music sounds night and day better then anything out there ,with a streamer you-get  a clean presentation , with HQplayer  your music you decide exactly howto taylor it to your system, having atop sound card is  key which truly lowers the noise floor and little green computer sells Sonore ,if you have the patience to learn the program over several weeks.

Tidal sounds great in my gear heap and that made Amazon (tried it briefly but...meh) seem unnecessary...A Node 2i into a Bifrost 2/64 DAC (the Node internal DAC doesn't sound nearly as good as either of my outboard DACs)...I don't see any reason to switch to Qobuz although I might try it just out of curiosity or peer pressure or to seem hip as it's important to at least "seem" hip. 

However, don't I give up being able to reproduce hi-res up to 24/192?  I believe Qobuz does not need to fold the music files 7 times like Tidal.  Perhaps as a result Qobuz is able to unfold faster and image better.

Tidal encodes hi-res into MQA format, which is a lossy compression method. When unfolded back to hi-res, the data is not identical to the original. Qobuz delivers the original hi-res data lossless and unaltered.

@mapman 

fwiw, I was listening to the same recording (Klaus Tennstedt conducting the London Philharmonic in Mahler Resurrection Symphony from the LPO house label) played both on AirPlay and Chromecast yesterday.  Streamer is Cambridge Audio CXN 60, source was Apple Music.  For some reason my Android phone wasn’t able to cast to the streamer, but my Android tablet was able to.  I had to charge tablet up so while that was occurring I used an iPad, which apparently won’t do Chromecast afaik, so I used AirPlay to the CA while awaiting the charge on the Android tablet.

  Chromecast easily beats AirPlay.  The work starts arrestingly with violin tremolos followed by slashing double basses, which were much fuller with Chromecast and threadbare on AirPlay. The mid range was much fuller on Chromecast..  And while I don’t have a CD for this particular recording, in the past I’ve done comparisons with CD vs AirPlay and found AirPlay to be wanting in comparison, albeit a step up from Bluetooth .

I have had Amazon HD since it came out.  I tried Quobuz and listened to songs with both and couldn't hear any difference.

3-D imaging, accuracy, etc.  High quality sound.  Other improvements are noticable way more than any music service.