qobuz Qobuz USA launching soon!

[Musicophile]

On 1/9/2018 at 5:52 AM, Madra said:

I thought they started with mp3 quality streaming and added Sublime and Sublime + later. My bad.

I only dowloaded High Res albums, but enjoy the site content a lot (french is my second language). I am seriously considering dropping Tidal and going Qobuz.

Sublime is not the name of their lossless streaming service (that is called Qobuz Hifi), but of a specific prepaid package where you purchase one year of the lossless streaming service paid in advance instead of monthly. In return you get a significant discount (often 30-50%) on any Highres albums you decide to purchase. 

 

For me, the Sublime package is essentially “free” given how much I save on the downloads (I tend to buy 2-3 highres downloads per month). Used this way, it is a really excellent deal. 

 

Sublime Plus is a relatively new offering allowing you to stream most of the available high res content in up to 24/192, for an incremental €10 per month approximately, and you get the same download discounts as for Sublime. 

 

For my streaming purposes (mainly discovery) lossless is enough, as I buy the stuff I really care about in Highres anyhow. A nice touch from Qobuz is that once you’ve purchased a Highres download you can stream it anywhere in up to 24/192 (or whatever the files resolution is) even without Sublime Plus. 

 

[Musicophile]

3 hours ago, wwc said:

I'm curious, what your decision is based on to use Sublime instead of Sublime +?

 

Do you find the downloaded HiRes files higher sq than the streamed HiRes?

(I'm interested to try Qobuz when released in the US to answer that question for myself.)

 

If they sound the same, it seems to make sense to simply stream rather than purchase downloads.

Tricky point. 

 

First of all, I don’t hear a difference between streamed highres and local highres files, especially when played via Audievana from memory

 

Couple of elements play into this for me:

 

I think I hear some difference between Highres and red book (although not sure I’d survive a blind test). 

 

Plus, if I now buy something, I want the best possible (“final”) version so I don’t have to buy it ever again, as long as the premium for high res isn’t too massive. 

 

The reason I like buying downloads on top of streaming is twofold: it gives me autonomy should I ever give up streaming (either because it gets to expensive or the service isn’t offered any more or or or), and I also want to make sure the artists make at least some money (which on streaming alone realistically they don’t). 

 

At the same time, the difference between Highres and redbook isn’t big enough for me to justify spending another €100 every year for it. 

 

Hope I made myself somewhat clear. 

 

 

[Musicophile]

4 hours ago, #Yoda# said:

 

I cannot check the files before buying, but Qobuz usually offer a refund when I can prove my complaint with a graphic report of the tool.

I've had a small number of upsampled albums which Qobuz refunded immediately (their customer service is overall quite decent), but much less so in recent years.

 

This may however be due to the fact that I mainly buy recent productions by good labels like Harmonia Mundi or ECM. I believe the false high-res problem is more often found in remasters of older albums. Did you see any pattern emerge in the false high-res albums?

[Musicophile]

1 hour ago, #Yoda# said:

You are right, I've downloaded less newer false HiRes albums in the past two years, but the older ones are still in their catalog. And yes, there is a pattern. Not all, but most of my upsampled albums are well known Rock/Blues/Folk albums from the 70s, rereleased as HiRes version between 2012 and 2015, usually by a Universal Music Group division.

I've downloaded not so much Classical or Jazz from Qobuz.com because until I subscribed Sublime a view months ago, Highresaudio.com usually had the better prices and the better HiRes catalog for this genres anyway, not to mention the guaranteed quality.

Makes sense.

 

In any case, the prices you get with Sublime are really hard to beat. Especially it seems like recently they've increased some of their regular download prices a bit, but with Sublime you're really getting excellent value for money. 

One thing to keep in mind for Qobuz pricing is that they sometimes have different prices per country (which I find quite annoying). Luckily I'm on the French store which seems to have the best prices overall.

[Musicophile]

35 minutes ago, #Yoda# said:

 

If you want to see a "nice" example for different prices:

 

https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/the-complete-studio-albums-the-doors/0603497933105

https://www.qobuz.com/it-it/album/the-complete-studio-albums-the-doors/0603497933105

https://www.qobuz.com/fr-fr/album/the-complete-studio-albums-the-doors/0603497933105

https://www.qobuz.com/de-de/album/the-complete-studio-albums-the-doors/0603497933105

 

Interesting to compare the first three with the last link.

 

It is not a joke and it is not the fault of Qobuz, the price differences at HDtracks are similar as far as I know. The prices are largely determined by the labels. 

Wow, I knew Germany was essentially paying for the rest of Europe (sorry for the political pun), but I didn't realize it was that bad even for music...

[Musicophile]

1 hour ago, wklie said:

 

Tidal subscription pricing is different for different country, too.  I've read someone saying Qobuz account for France has access to the largest number of albums (compare to Qobuz for other countries), can anyone confirm?  I believe Tidal for US has access to the most albums, especially Tidal Masters.

I've seen examples (but don't recall them). Unfortunately this is really out of the control of Qobuz, this is the 19th century mentality of the record labels.

[Musicophile]

8 minutes ago, rando said:

How successful have any of you been at tracking down the "best masters" on Quobuz?  How about obscure high quality recordings?  It appears label control would interfere with curation.  Pricing, whew!  If the US post-launch looks too ugly I might have try posing as Signor Rando.

It´s far from perfect. It is really good for purchasing new releases, but for older remasters you'll often have to do some digging to find out which remaster is worth purchasing. 

 

One more thing to keep in mind: they have a lot of what looks like high-res recordings but are marked BNF for Bibliotheque Nationale de France (the entire digital music library of the BNF has been digitized and can be bought via Qobuz), which can be very confusing.

[Musicophile]

Guys do yourself a favor and don’t use the regular desktop app but Audirvana instead. Much better SQ. And an iOS Remote.