I picked Qobuz. Although honestly the same file, streamed with a lossless codec and played back via competently implemented software, sounds the same (the “same file” part here can be a bit tricky, since it’s not unheard of for different files to be provided to different services for various reasons).
But with sound quality being effectively a wash across the services that provide lossless streams qobuz wins for me on most other factors. As others have noted they pay the most to artists, but equally or more importantly they don’t participate in some of the more anti-artist and anti-listener activity that the larger platforms engage in. Others have noted algorithmic playlists as a major factor in favor of services like Spotify, but for me those features lose a lot of their allure once you realize that in addition to the expected “we think you’ll like this song” inputs those algorithms are also using factors like “this label charges us less per stream/actually paid us to put this song on more playlists” and “this artist signed a temporary exclusive deal with a competitor so to reach them a lesson they’re not going on any playlists for a while” to decide what actually plays.
Also prefer qobuz since at least most of the HD streams are FLAC rather than MQA. Although I generally can’t tell the difference between an MQA and lossless stream the difference in bandwidth is negligible and MQAs marketing and licensing structure both annoy me. Beyond that the the engineer in me automatically hates the idea of something low-level like a compression algorithm that’s not open-sourced.
Finally the album focus on qobuz just suits the way I generally listen better. A well put-together album tends to have a flow from song to song that gets lost when pulling out single tracks.
Ok climbing down from my soapbox now lol. Thanks for anyone who read that whole rant.
I do not know the answer to this question, because I do not use Tidal (or any other online-only music service). But there is an easy way to test this. Can you download FLAC music files from Tidal? And can you then play those FLAC files to another device without any internet connection?
If not, then they could be feeding you anything if you can’t just download from their service, then play the music without being connected to their ‘stream’.
I have a couple articles which should help a bit in understanding why I answered the question in this way - if you already know what these files are, and how compression works, then feel free to skip everything further in this post, as it does not apply to you. And is only here for reference.
But if you feel that a better understanding of what FLAC is, might assist you in the future, then proceed onward dear reader!
(as an aside - I don’t trust wikipedia further than I can throw them - BUT this hopefully should be just a simple explanation of FLAC and not biased as so many things usually are… i mean, it’s just a type of audio data… That can’t be too biased, right? … I really should know better before saying that in a forum filled with people who care more than practically anyone else about audio… )
I’m not sure there is a “the best” but I can say that Amazon HD is quite great sounding, I like their app along with the blue OS integration into my Node. Getting Wiim pro in a week or so… so looking forward to testing the Wiim integration.
I have not tried roon or qobuz so but the rest were meh for me. I think there are some apps better than amazon algo for music discovery but I kinda know what I want to listen to so not an issue for me.
Yes hifi is flac wrapped but limited to CD - 16bit - quality. Masters “supposedly” extends to 24bit but is MQA wrapped. I have encountered some flac wrapped 24bit files under the Masters or plus subscription (can’t remember the name) but not sure how predominant that is.
Sadly no streaming service allows the download and movement of files (though there are 3rd parties offering this online) unless it is an individual Item download as per bandcamp and Qoboz Sublime. They are all to varying degrees copyright protected. So an offline download effected through Tidal will work playing from within Tidal when offline but will not be a transferable file which can be played in another player. Spotify is designed similarly but is easier to overcome. This issue is why Hiby Os can not do offline downloads only online streams - a real feature loss for them, as they cannot load the native apps like an android player can and their link is through api integration only.
Ok, now because this has been brought up, I am required by local law to mention a very big problem with MQA.
Prepare for an info dump of epic proportions when you click the down arrow to expand this linked post!
Stomp!
In short - never use MQA and I suggest avoiding any services that offer it. It’s an attempt to abuse the community with a bad product that not only reduces audio quality (and lies about it), but it also tries to hook people on services that require endless subscription fees to continue using. It’s a bad egg all around - don’t eat bad eggs. And never pay companies to abuse you.
Not entirely correct. FLAC is just a wrapper, it can easily reach 24 bit. And it is much better than MQA for the reasons I elaborated on in the prior post.
Once you have a FLAC file, it’s yours. You can put it on anything, and play it on anything, and some random company can never take that from you. Get FLAC’ed But avoid MQA
Oh, and avoid any DAP or player that won’t let you run FLAC, or MP3, or other free alternatives to the ‘paid’ options. (specifically the apple music players and products usually fall into this category of ‘high avoidance’)
…The clue’s in the term Lossless: FLAC packs music without losing any of the content or quality, and when ‘unzipped’ correctly the file is exactly the same as the original file. And while we’ve seen a number of rival lossless systems, from Apple Lossless (ALAC) to Windows Media Audio Lossless (WMA Lossless), the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is the system of choice for many music-loving hi-fi buffs, simply because it’s not tied to any one manufacturer’s systems.
And it can do more than cut the size of CD-quality files: FLAC can also come in 24-bit form and beyond, as Albert Yong of Bowers & Wilkins explains: ‘The system is so flexible that it can take anything from 4 to 32 bits and sample rates up to 655350Hz in 1 Hz steps.’…
By comparison my earlier post about MQA shows how MQA is just bad, and the MQA company is purposefully trying to obscure that fact as proven in GoldenSound’s video I linked concerning MQA. (here is that link again, in case you need it) [I published music on Tidal to test MQA - MQA Review]
Even the name ‘MQA’ is supposed to stand for ‘Master Quality Audio’ but that is a blatant falsehood designed to draw customers in and trap them.
Many people involved in the Hifi world have feelings about MQA, and few of them are good feelings…
I am aware of this and also the issues with Goldensound’s testing methodologies that have been debated heavily and pettily over at ASR. For me personally, yes what Goldensound did is flawed in understanding and execution but the intention was great, and his overarching result still stands (with some qualifications) - I am led to believe that this provided some of the impetus for the creation of the Tidal hifi tier where MQA is removed.
His findings resonate regarding the marketing which is borderline criminal and for which there should be serious repercussions. However that doesn’t detract from some of the positives of the technology such as file size, SQ and transmission/extraction. Just in the present day those benefits no longer translate especially in developed nations inside a home environment.
Whilst we all applaud open source codecs - for many businesses this model is not always feasible and in the creative/tech industries we see multiple industries suffering from heavy handed licensing deals (Adobe & Pantone is a good current example). But there is also a place for licensed offerings if they have a purpose. The problem is when it’s a manufactured purpose as with MQA in its present form, as well as the means in which the license costs are being subsumed by consumers as part of hardware. If it was marketed as a substantial SQ improvement to 320 with a lower bitrate and so file size whilst retaining enhanced transmission stabilization I would see it’s place in a world where not everyone has high speed internet or unlimited data consumption models and also where we need to find means to compress data for cost and environmental issues. But that doesn’t make for an upsell to a new payment tier or to upgrade a home audio DAC. And it also by requiring these additional purchases does not endear itself to lower cost customers who would be the target for a technology that served consumers within throttled speed areas or on limited data plans.
The bigger issue for me is regarding the walled off encoding process and future mastering from MQA files which have populated music archives instead of lossless flac. No one wants degraded masters to work from.
But to be honest this walled off approach is still going on for Apple Audio products as well as for Dolby where the quick & dirty Atmos mastering of the last few years could be said to be a bigger long term issue than MQA.
But equally I cannot extend the reach of malice from MQA (the brand) to third party companies that use its technology and provide the option of whether you want to pay for it as a solitary feature set or not. If we eliminate Qoboz and Tidal for MQA and Apple for ALAC. Do we not also have an issue on moral grounds with Spotify and Amazon (they openly sell your data in addition to their labour practices and hostile business pricing and acquisition strategies).
As long as I have the option not to use MQA or at least not to have to pay for it - I am ok with it as my means of balancing ethics and the pragmatism of needing a streaming provider that covers my audio feature set and catalogue requirements.
And there you have one of the very good reasons I avoid using all online services for music. It’s not just about saving money. Don’t rent your music - store it on your own hardware and play it from there.
If you have already bought a lot of music over the years, then depending on where you live there is a perfectly legal option to download it from ‘alternative services’ provided you already have paid for it previously. (Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of rum!)
I stand corrected… I put Momentum 3’s on my 88 year old Mom, connected them to a Fiio M11 Plus LTD streaming Quobuz Christmas songs. The smile she has on her face easily makes it worth the subscription price.
I notice more variety of tracks on TIDAL than on Qobuz. Also now Tidal seems to be creating more playlists which was something I was missing from Spotify. Not to mention that Tidal has a lot of songs for different moods and states.
Added to the “radio” function that Tidal has and Qobuz doesn’t (although it has an attempt which is that when the album ends it plays similar songs) … If we add to that the fact that the songs appear first on TIDAL …
I think I’ll stay on TIDAL.
Mostly because I pay 6€ for Tidal Hifi (50% discount) and Qobuz costs 17€.
As much as I generally like the idea of owning music instead of renting it, if you’re looking to be able to stream it rather than just have it on a PC or DAP the costs just don’t work out. It’s effectively impossible to mirror even most of the features of one of the major streaming platforms without spending even more than the monthly sub. And that’s without taking the cost of the actual music into account.
The absolute cheapest cloud storage available (at least that’s suitable for streaming) is about $6/TB (that’s likely more than you need for housing a bunch of audio, but services that allow for smaller increments of data also charge more so won’t save much). Then you need some form of compute to actually serve those files, again you’re looking at at least $5/month at the extreme low end. Those together put you above a tidal hi-fi subscription, before accounting for network egress or any required software licensing. You can maybe do better hosting at home and spreading the costs of a single board computer and a disk out over a few years, but not much after accounting for power use, and that path only exacerbates the real cost here - time.
If you’re capable of putting the pieces I just talked about together in under a day, your time is worth enough to pay for several years of that tidal sub with that day of work. Plus you still need to support it, maintain it, replatform it when that cheap hosting provider goes out of business or that raspberry pi fails, etc. even assuming it’s mostly trouble free, your probably going to average at least a half hour a month, again completely outweighing the costs of just using a streaming service.
None of that means there aren’t good reasons to go down this road. If your favorite music isn’t broadly available on the streaming platforms it may be your only option. You may be weird like me and spending a Friday night cobbling together your own streaming service may sound like a good time. But for most people it’s both easier and cheaper to just sign up for a streaming service and enjoy listening to some music.
This also assumes you will always have access to the internet.
I find the internet to be (*even today ) absurdly unreliable, spotty, and suffers from slowdown frequently. I can lose connection to online services multiple times daily, and it’s not too uncommon that the internet will just stop working entirely for more than a day at a time. Then there are frequent latency and slowdown problems. And I live in the middle of a city. (not a huge city, certainly, but still a city). And we have fiber to this area too.
The internet can’t be relied upon. I don’t trust it. And I certainly don’t trust anyone else with my data. I’ve always been that way though.
(also there are many areas I regularly travel through which don’t even have basic cell coverage.)
I have YTPremium for general use and the music videos…tiny desk concerts, etc. and a few lists of my own with music I can’t seem to find anywhere else.
I use Spotify mostly for streaming to my 2 channel setup through chromecast and to find a particular song when AMHD comes up blank because I missed one letter! Tried Qobuz and feel they were best of these, but since they have gaps in my preferred classical and jazz library I use AMHD most of the time for serious listening with my headphone rig. Have to mention an RIP for Primephonic, the
all classical one from Amsterdam, which had the best sound quality and their
suggested lists and new release updates were great. Unfortunately Apple bought them out and buried them…after promises they would have a classical section using PP’s lists and presumably their experienced staff. Poof…gone. At this point I (we) are still waiting for Spotify to go lossless (doubtful) or I may
get a Wiim to stream AMHD to my 2 channel. I must say however, that I really appreciate the ability to access so much music at such amazingly high quality!
In short, best of ones I tried…Qobuz AMHD Spotify YT
Maybe its the playback software and hardware I use, but when I play an MQA file one or both, depending on which listening setup I’m using, tells me when I’m playing an MQA encoded file. I’ll also say that MQA is so rare on Qobuz that I had to specifically go searching to find it when I read about the 2L thing in an article and I had never come upon an MQA file in my own extensive listening and dowloading.
All of that said, I would definitely prefer it if Qobuz refused to accept MQA submissions from labels/artists and I would also prefer it if they clearly labeled any MQA files they have so customers can easily determine from Qobuz’s own app when their playing an MQA encoded file or stream.
From what I understand the hardware (if MQA capable) and any third party software will flag the file but Qobuz itself does not. Seems weird as the issue has been known for years.
Just for clarification - I was not criticizing Qobuz just illustrating how there was a need to distinguish MQA evils from its licensees and their intentions.
)
And never pay companies to abuse you.
But avoid MQA 
