What’s Quboz like in the States?
Here in Germany I read in the reviews that the support is terrible.
Furthermore, there are often dropouts, the search is supposed to be complicated, not all titles are available although you have 70 million songs stored, and other points… but they were not too important.
I can confirm that there are dropouts from my test time 6-7 months ago.
I can also confirm that it often has quality problems, as titles often scratch like an old CD.
What options are left then?
I can’t say whether it will be better with Audirvana.
This morning I looked at Tidal to see what they offer.
For $10 you get the standard and for $20 you get hi-fi.
When I subscribed it said lossless music dsd files ect.
Today you can’t find anything about it, only the 10$ and 20$ subscription.
I haven’t found any Dsd files unless I sample them up and then I can have each file sampled to DSD.
That used to be different.
Furthermore, the Hifi subscription offers 360 degree sound.
In the settings, I can select what I want as a Hifi subscription.
Normal,Cd,Hifi or MQA resolution.
Does this affect the sound and the selection of files?
Almost all Tidal files have been through the MQA process before being delivered in whatever format you choose. So they are not the original files even if you choose 16/44.
I haven’t had any issues with Qobuz - I use it both through Audirvana and the Qobuz app. IME their selection is about on par with Tidal and so is their recommendation engine. Both are behind Spotify in these respects.
I have occasional loss of connection, but it’s no more common than any other streaming service I use, that’s all going to be down to the CDN provider they are using, and your local Internet provider.
I very much doubt they manage their own infrastructure, it’s just not feasible if your not Amazon, Google or Microsoft.
I’ve been very pleased with Qobuz, I do run across the occasional thing that Amazon has and Qobuz doesn’t, but it’s very infrequent for my tastes.
I use it through Roon (which was the primary reason I switched from Amazon), so I can’t comment on the Search and Discovery experience through the App.
I had many issues with both tidal and deezer when it comes to just getting them to play music.
Some days they worked fine, some days they wouldn’t start playing songs, or work intermittently.
And way too many bugs in the UI to be acceptable for the premium tiers.
Spotify has been stable as a rock. Looking forward to their hifi plan.
The concept and origins of the MQA model is anything but snakeoil. The execution and evolution of that concept as it moved onwards into today’s (Tidal) business model is what’s suspect.
That’s the point. it isn’t about sonic differences since everyone is allowed their opinions and where to throw their money. It’s about clear deceptive business practices and unfounded claims with a liberal dose of removing option.
Q2 business statements from Tidal will tell the story I’m sure. They’ve got to be hemorrhaging customers.
so they encode audio to reduce the file size and then you need propietary hardware to decode it again for a lossfull result and sell it as super good sounding and super file size saving.
That is literally snakeoil.
and btw the definition of snakeoil is not referring to the product itself but the practice to deceive customers into buying a product by promising effects that the product does not have.
We already have everything that MQA does in a ton of other formats. It can only be snakeoil if somebody tries to sell you something that you already have for free.
This is not a correct statement of what the MQA standard was created for. Watch Paul’s video up there ^^ you’ll get a better sense of what the discussion is about.
How did it evolve from “If we know the recording/mixing equipment, we can use DSP to correct for that” to “here’s our proprietary compression algorithm that requires special hardware to decode”?
Follow the $! I mean isn’t it always the case? Imagine the heavy lift of figuring out what recorded/encoded the file to the apply a filter to return that on the decoding. Sounds impressive AF but it would require a serious “standards” effort and ongoing maintenance and then how do you confirm everything?
Easy to see how the intent would warp once it became a business model.
If I understand correctly, the initial intent of MQA was to be able to deliver beyond CD quality audio streams in a bitstream that was the roughly the same size as a redbook 16/44.1 flac stream. In other words they wanted to be able to pack an HD-sized pile of data into an SD-sized envelope to make delivery and storage more bandwidth and memory friendly. Back when MQA was an initial idea, bandwidth and data transfer rates were much lower than they are here in the early 3rd decade of the 21st century. Storage was also much more expensive. I agree with @db_Cooper that this initial intent is not snake oil.
I think MQA is a victim of the dual realities of the time it takes to develop such a codec AND the inevitable march of technology. In 2021, the vast majority of entry-level broadband service plans and even cellular data plans have more than enough bandwidth to support a lossless hi-res audio stream with ease. Data storage is also significantly cheaper; I have over 3500 tracks of 16/44.1 - 24/192 FLAC files and DSD on the 512gig microsd card in my DAP and it’s little more than half full. That microsd card cost me less than $100. 10 years ago $100 would be…I don’t even remember…4 Gb?
So, the pool of potential customers that have the audio gear and disposable income to seek out lossless/HD music AND lives in a region where bandwidth and storage space make an MQA-like solution necessary is very small, and probably not big enough to support an already niche business like lossless music streaming.
An MQA-like solution might still be beneficial in parts of the world that don’t yet have the data infrastructure to support massive amounts of streaming. But, even that is temporary, probably.
IMO Tidal is making a dangerous gambit by putting so many eggs in the MQA basket.
I think this is a good way to look at it. If getting a product to market / market adoption takes too long then the underlying market it was intended to service can disappear. Then the business guys scramble to make money / recoup cost of development, leading to selling features that are of dubious value.
Any product developed around storage or bandwidth optimization is doomed to long-term failure. These two things are commodities, with decreasing per-bit value each year (cost to transmit and store one bit decreasing rapdily). That’s why cable companies fight to not just sell fat-pipe data links in the US. They know it’s low value, low differentiation, and won’t make good margin profit long term. Even cell phone companies act on this with 4G/5G data service - they try to bundle it with higher differentiated (higher margin) products like streaming services on top of the data link. Anything operating in the storage / bandwidth optimization space (ie Audio CODECs) really benefits from being open-sourced. The community will improve and maintain it “for free” long term. Not that proprietary is inherently bad. It’s just inherently not sustainable.
MQA is a victim of this. The difference between 16/44.1 and 24/192 is round off error for most users data link and storage. Some day this will be true for hires DSD (and honestly could be so today if someone wanted to offer it for streaming, it’s no worse than streaming netflix).
Simple! $$$. Long answer is that it was a new compression format that was purchased by an outside investor(s) group. The cool stuff wasn’t a profitable selling point, but the compression part was. The big sell for MQA from a business standpoint is how much it costs to serve each customer. Or at least this is my understanding.
