View Full Version : Qobuz Hi-Fi Versus Spotify Premium
I'm going to cancel my Spotify subs after using Qobuz for a while now.
It doesn't have all the features Spotify has, but the bottom line is the library is fine in terms of content (though not as good as Spotify).
The killer aspect is the SQ is notably better on a very high quality system. I'm sure it will kill the amount of CDs I buy. Rather than using Spotify to decide what to buy, there's no reason to actually buy it - quite scary, really. The sound quality is genuinely adequate rather than being a compromised 320 KBps at the best of times.
£20 is steep, but once you get used to using it, I think it is worth it. The mobile app on Android is actually very good - better, really, than the desktop version. Well, I think so.
This is a good service. I find it far more responsive than Spotify too, despite the higher bandwidth required. It doesn't hang up/get slow.
So, where Spotify beat Napster, Qobuz, beats Spotify. Quality throughput is the paramount factor for me.
Completely agree. I've been using it for 3 months and sound wise it smashes Spotify. If they improve the App just a little it could be very special.
£20 is a lot to pay for streamed music. These days I just use Spotify to research new music to see if I want to purchase
The point is when you have Qobuz YOU DON'T NEED TO BUY IT. Scary, very scary... LOL.
I give it a month free trial but must admit I still like having a atual physical copy even if I mostly listen to it on file
I agree. So do I. But let's face it there are counter-arguments. And increasingly I am beginning to think "whats the point?" in the physical copy. It just takes up space. If it's not on Qobuz, then definitely still worth it.
Hi,
The other big advantage is being able to use your Qobuz sub on a PC plus 3 other devices at the same time, with Spotify its only 1. So Qobuz is perfect for our house.
Mike.
£20 is a lot to pay for streamed music. These days I just use Spotify to research new music to see if I want to purchase
Same here. No stream is going to replace having a CD of uncompressed music in my collection.
Same here. No stream is going to replace having a CD of uncompressed music in my collection.
Why when there is no sonic advantage, and no need for a back up?
This "need" is something that will increasingly dissolve as people come to terms with it over time.
Mark my words:eyebrows:
I use streaming for finding music, listening in the office and being able to at any point put a particular track on. However when I find an album I like I either buy it in CD, SACD or download the best quality available. For Agnes Obel I recently downloaded the studio master which is amazing. I also like to buy music to support the industry/artist.
I use streaming for finding music, listening in the office and being able to at any point put a particular track on. However when I find an album I like I either buy it in CD, SACD or download the best quality available. For Agnes Obel I recently downloaded the studio master which is amazing. I also like to buy music to support the industry/artist.
With Qobuz, no point - the CD WON'T be better. Plus all that hunting you do will be in CD quality. Also, they sell HD downloads too.
I find a CD better than the streamed qobuz, I do use Qobuz downloads as well, be interesting to see how they compare to PONO when that launches.
I bet your not using Qobuz Hi-Fi. I've compared CD versus Qobuz and THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE I can detect.
Mind you, I rip my CDs to compressed lossless FLAC - the same as Qobuz. Then again, I can't tell any difference between playing the CD live and the compressed lossless. Logically, I shouldn't be able to either, though some may refute that.
It all works off the same laptop to the same DAC, though. So it is a pretty exact comparison.
I do use Qobuz HiFi, desktop version on MBP. It's very very good but not as good as a CD ripped and played via Audirvana. It's a massive step up from Spotify
The last straight comparison I did was a lossless rip of Hole's Nobody's Daugther against Qobuz. Initially I thought the CD rip better, with the Qobuz version sounding brighter and more etched - in a not for the better way.
Then I just kept swapping between the two... and became convinced I was imagining it.
If there is a difference it isn't massive. But yes, defo better than Spotify at it's best 320KBps.
I might try and find a USB port packet sniffer and confirm whether the data sent to the DAC is identical or not. That would nail it - and catch Qobuz out if it isn't i.e. they aren't just straight rips. They might have normalised some stuff or done other things to it.
Reading the label on the packet I'd expect it to be identical, LOL.
EDIT: Wireshark does it (usually the goto for Ethernet packet sniffing) - will defo try it.
had Qbuz for a while but settled with Spotifty because it is much cheaper, has a far bigger music selection and is good enough @ 320kbs in my stereo, the weak link being an iphone transmitting @41kHz... i also had the impression that Qbuz was better sounding. For classical music Qb is probably better imho.
When my wife told me she was paying £110/month for Sky TV, phone & internet, I figured £20/month for music was an absolute relative steal:)
a month !! wow that is a lot of doe ..
It's ridiculous money. We need to reduce it.
Anyway, downloaded USBPcap for Wireshark, mainly cos I'm used to Wireshark. Will have a look in the next few days. I must admit I think I'll be surprised if the ripped CD and Qobuz have exactly the same output, but in my head I really think they should do. Curious enough to check it out. Watch this space.
USBPcap captured precisely nothing, and not wanting to spend ages figuring out why, I moved on to: http://www.usblyzer.com/usb-protocol-analyser-faq.htm, which did work.
In the raw data field, nothing but zeros are captured in the USB packets until play is pressed on JRiver or Qobuz. Then, low and behold, you can quite clearly see the data differs between the two from the word go.
The s/w was set to capture from the Amanero controlled hub.
I'm fairly sure JRiver is set to do nothing to the output, and so is Qobuz. However, there are other things that may affect their output format. I'll do a bit more checking but I wouldn't conclude anything yet. In fact, this whole episode may prove inconclusive.
Comparing raw FLAC files (by buying a Qobuz one, assuming it is the same as that which they stream) is not much cop since FLAC allows varying degrees of lossless compression, and you can't be sure what has been applied, or indeed which version of an encoder was used. There are other variables as well, for instance was the Qobuz FLAC created from the same source as the CD I have.
This is a real case of how much effort can you be bothered to expend in order to find out what is actually happening. I might strike lucky and get matching data but I am not hopeful at the mo.
Actually I can eliminate any JRiver/Qobuz imposed output discrepancies by using Quobuz to play both the file and streamed sources. Shoulda thought of that earlier. Will try that tomoz.
It certainly better quality than Spotify but still not up with using programmes such as MQn on a Windows based system For pure music quality streaming still does not do it for me sorry. But glad it works for others. I will stick to Spotify as I use it to discover new albums to purchase
I'm trying to prove there's no difference, John. There shouldn't be one. I may fail, LOL.
BTW having tried JPlay etc I have to say I think such programs are TOTAL foo. But that is just my considered opinion. You are entitled to your own beliefs, of course.
It is really just me satisfying my own curiosity. I'm sure when I prove it to myself beyond my own questionable doubt, I'll be happy:)
However Qobuz is freaking out at the moment as it considers the large music library on my hard drive I've just drawn its attention to. Hopefully it'll recover but it isn't looking good at the moment.
Well, importing my music library into Qobuz didn't work. And I can't find a way to play my library files via Qobuz as a result. Looks like they need to do a bit more work there.
One thing that did surprise me is that taking a USB data snapshot of Qobuz playing the same track twice resulted in appreciably different traces. In order to really understand what's going on, the documents on this link need to be considered: http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/
That's a lot of work. Too much for an unpaid leisure activity.
At the end of the day, I'd be amazed if it isn't what Qobuz says it is i.e. lossless 16 bit 44.1KHz data. Given USB audio drivers that comply with the specs, and using the same drivers for all audio playback, be it CD or ripped files, or indeed streamed data, there should NOT be any difference between them.
If you think you can hear differences given the previous paragraph, I'd seriously check out the various settings your audio playback software is capable of.
Given the above is true, I think Qobuz is a genuine game changer. If what I have said isn't true, well, hey... I'll continue to live in a state of delusion:)
[QUOTE=User211;544031]I'm trying to prove there's no difference, John. There shouldn't be one. I may fail, LOL.
BTW having tried JPlay etc I have to say I think such programs are TOTAL foo. But that is just my considered opinion. You are entitled to your own beliefs, of course.
QUOTE]
Fair enough perhaps its Foo Sound is so subjective I personally think you get a lot more out of cleaning up the power supplies like Tim has done with computer Audio
I agree their improvement with Qobuz ( I no idea why) just for me I still prefer streaming music for resource work. I guess we all different
[QUOTE=User211;544031]I'm trying to prove there's no difference, John. There shouldn't be one. I may fail, LOL.
BTW having tried JPlay etc I have to say I think such programs are TOTAL foo. But that is just my considered opinion. You are entitled to your own beliefs, of course.
QUOTE]
Fair enough perhaps its Foo Sound is so subjective I personally think you get a lot more out of cleaning up the power supplies like Tim has done with computer Audio
I agree their improvement with Qobuz ( I no idea why) just for me I still prefer streaming music for resource work. I guess we all different
Bluedroog
21-04-2014, 10:37
I ditched Spotify in favour of Qobuz a few months ago and it is now my primary source if music via a Squeezebox Touch.
The sound is a clear step up to me and I while a smaller library frustrates at times the trade off is worth it for me, I'm hopeful the library will continue to expand.
A quick note for people to beware of, even if you purchase the hifi version by default he settings remain on compressed steaming, you have to select lossless even if you have the hifi premium version.
Also annoyingly on the continent this is 20 Euros so cheaper than we get it here in the UK.
There's quite a bit of HD stuff in the store to download but you can't stream it and have to pay for it. Well, they've drawn the line somewhere:)
Also just discovered a really nice feature - album art about 80% the size of your screen height in great quality. Just click on the album cover at the top of the screen for the album your playing.
dave2010
21-04-2014, 19:15
I've not so far got round to trying Qobuz. This might push me to try, though there are other factors. I don't particularly want to have to pay more to any of our ISPs for additional data traffic. We currently have two different ISPs - one is BT the other John Lewis. JL is I believe unlimited, and the phone calls are, I'm told, effectively free - once we've paid the monthly charge. BT is good, but I discovered quickly that phone calls via BT are much more expensive than via our previous provider, and we don't have an unlimited data transfer package either. I thought that 40 Gbytes/month would do, but in the first month we nearly hit the limit. I figure it would cost maybe another £80 per year to go unlimited.
With streaming services, with either provider, we sometimes get breaks. BT is probably better in this respect, but we do a lot of downloading from the JL service.
Also, using streaming, sometimes the gaps between tracks aren't done well. One I was listening to yesterday jumped from before the end of one track to the next - I doubt whether that would happen with the CD. There are some real problems with gaps in some music - which Napster and Spotify didn't manage to avoid. Perhaps Qobuz avoids such problems.
I believe that the quality of Qobuz will be better, but I tend to use Spotify and also Napster to find unusual things to listen to. If I like what I hear I look out for the CDs or SACDs etc. Another service I trialled for a while was the Sony music service. The quality was quite good, and the music selections also good, but the user interface was, for me at least, pretty awful. I gave up after a few weeks. Perhaps when I have a little more time I'll trial Qobuz though, as it now seems to be taking off in the UK.
Sounds cool, but at the moment I would prefer to 'tradeoff' with a massively higher Spotify library as I also use it a lot as a casual & exploration medium.
I found Spotify SQ annoying as I found myself searching for new stuff on it a lot. That meant lots of sub-par listening. So it got cancelled today, but I'm good til the end of May. I bet I don't use it much between now and then.
I'm not finding the reduced catalogue much of an issue... it seems pretty good, but defo not as good as Spotify.
You can download any lossless FLACs you want to your hard drive for offline use, but the list view displaying the downloaded tracks is an issue. It only supports single select. Naff for deleting stuff you decide you don't want. Time & s/w revisions should sort this out, you'd hope.
Sounds more tempting especially FLAC downloads... Perhaps something to run alongside Spotify. Thanks for the interesting posts.
No probs Neil.
The first month is free if you supply payment details and you can cancel anytime I believe. Run in-parallel with Spotify for a while and see what you think. Cop out if you don't like it - easy enough to do I'm sure.
No probs Neil.
The first month is free if you supply payment details and you can cancel anytime I believe. Run in-parallel with Spotify for a while and see what you think. Cop out if you don't like it - easy enough to do I'm sure.
Cool, decided to give it a whirl tonight. :)
Be interesting to see what you think.
One thing - on my 2nd system I'm not too bothered between Spotify and Qobuz SQ. On my main system, I really do care about it, because I becomes obvious Spotify is falling short of the mark.
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