MUSIC STREAMING REVIEW: QOBUZ
Qobuz, the Music Streaming Service Made for Audiophiles by Audiophiles
Excellent sound quality and unbiased musical culture
Verdict
Unknown to many, Qobuz has steadily gathered praise and recognition among audiophiles. They pride themselves on audio quality and “an incomparable musical culture”. Believe me, they deliver.
If Qobuz is not for you, read about Tidal HiFi, Amazon Music HD and Apple Music.
- Strengths: sound quality, hi-res, made for audiophiles, unbiased musical culture, competitive price, download store
- Weaknesses: library, slower than other apps, does not work with voice assistants
Key information
- Type of service: hifi on-demand music streaming
- Cost: $14.99/month or $149.99/year, first month free. Or $249.99/year to get discounts on the Qobuz download store.
- Audio formats: lossless, FLAC at 16-Bit/44.1 kHz (CD quality), including 215,000 albums available at 24 bits 44.1 kHz (Hi-Res Audio)
- Declared library size: 50 million tracks*
- Platforms: mobile, desktop, car. See complete list.
Experience
Qobuz apps are elegant and uncluttered. Contrary to the dark mode and gradient trends, Qobuz opts for solid white on the background, with blue and black for text. As simple as it gets.
Their mobile app is divided into four sections: Discover, My Qobuz, Offline library and Search.
The fact that “Discover” acts as the homepage says a lot. Qobuz wants to create a sense of community that helps you discover new music, but their approach is radically different from Spotify’s.
Instead of relying on algorithms, Qobuz puts its editorial content front and center and it combines audio, video and text. For example, as I write this article, I see a piece (dubbed “Panoramas”) titled “Know Your Lemmy”, a long-piece on Motörhead’s frontman.
“My Qobuz” houses everything that a user has saved so far, as well as playlists and recently played music. Any music downloaded for offline listening is also available in the “Offline library” tab, which makes it super easy to reach for your downloads when you don’t have an internet connection.
Finally, searching in Qobuz is easy enough. The results page updates as you type, but not so fast as other apps do. In fact, speed is not great across their apps. Qobuz users inevitably get used to waiting a couple of seconds for content to load. Of all the apps reviewed for this article, Qobuz comes in last in this sense.
User experience is good in Qobuz, but it falls behind Spotify, Apple Music and even Tidal. But Qobuz is for audiophiles and it there is a lot they have to offer.
As a Tidal user, I felt that their owners where using recommendations to promote their music. As a Qobuz user, I feel like this is made for audiophiles by audiophiles. It is so easy to see the bitrate and frequency of a track that I know Qobuz understands my quirks. Additionally, the listening experience is enriched with digital booklets, artist overviews, album reviews and curated playlists.
Catalog size and sound quality
In November 2019, Qobuz proved their commitment to high quality sound as they announced that they were ditching MP3 to focus exclusively on the lossless FLAC format.
With this move, Qobuz now offers all their catalog in CD-quality (16 bits/44.1 kHz), including 215,000 albums in hi-res audio (24 bits/44.1 kHz). This change also came with an aggressive move that lowered the price of their Studio Premier plan to $14.99/month or $149.99/year, which makes Qobuz 25% cheaper than its main competitor, Tidal.
Qobuz sounds amazing. When tested in my HiFi setup at home, the difference against free and premium plans was evident and rewarding. Plus Qobuz can also deliver hi-res on their mobile app.
My wife and I did some basic blind tests on our home setup comparing Qobuz against Apple Music first and against Tidal the following day. While Qobuz won against Apple Music time and time again, we couldn’t choose between Qobuz and Tidal HiFi. Some songs sounded better on Tidal, some sounded better on Qobuz, some sounded about the same.
As for their catalog, Qobuz claims to have a library of 50 million tracks, which should suffice. It is the same size reported by Spotify and Amazon Unlimited, but during my tests, Qobuz failed to find some of my favorite albums, like Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, available everywhere else. Other reviewers have found the same issue (see TechHive and Business Insider), but reading online forums, I have also found many that hail their eclectic library, especially in the jazz and classical genres.
I spent a lot of time searching albums on Qobuz and its competitors to assess their catalogs. On the one hand, I wanted a benchmark that would be useful to most of my readers, so I searched the first 200 albums on Rolling Stone magazine list of “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
I also wanted to see how Qobuz did at finding the music that I was searching for my personal use, so I noted down all my music searches for 3 weeks.
On the first test, Qobuz performed strongly. It found 92% of the top 200 albums on the Rolling Stone’s list. As a reference, Tidal achieved 93%, as did Apple Music, Deezer, Pandora and Spotify.
Qobuz was less impressive when faced with my personal searches. Of all the services I tested, Qobuz scored the lowest with a 77% success rate. Spotify was the indisputable leader in this test, hitting 86%. Amazon and Apple Music follow closely at 85% and Tidal still beat Qobuz at 84%.
If you are interested in a Qobuz subscription, I encourage you to use the free trial period to check that their catalog matches your wants.
Last of all, if you are one of those who want to own their own music files, Qobuz has its own store, where you can buy in a variety of lossless formats and without DRM (you own the files). Similarly to Amazon Music Unlimited, Qobuz allows you to combine their streaming library with your purchases from the Qobuz store. However, it does not allow users to upload files obtained elsewhere like you can do on Apple Music, Deezer and Spotify. If you are looking for that kind of integration with your personal library, you will be happy to hear that Qobuz is fully integrated with beloved players Roon and Audirvana.
Music discovery
Spotify takes an algorithmic approach to content recommendation. Apple, and Tidal also leverage their automated recommendation engines, but rely on editorial recommendations too. Qobuz is the only streaming service that relies solely on editorial recommendations.
Their human approach has advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, this system cannot offer the tailor-made experience that Spotify creates for their subscribers. However, it is also unlikely that Spotify will help you discover music that is outside of your comfort zone. As Glenn McDonald phrased it in an article for Experience, “the filter bubble nudges us away from wandering into fresh territory, subtly and relentlessly whittling down our options, offering a path of least resistance”.
The warm human touch of Qobuz editorial recommendations brings a breath of fresh air that will take you places. You can filter recommendations by genre to narrow the field and many of them come with an in-depth review penned in house by Qobuz editors.
Integrations
Aside from the above mentioned Roon and Audirvana, Qobuz is widely integrated with hifi brands and features its own Qobuz Connect as well as the popular wireless protocols Bluetooth, AirPlay and Chromecast. Qobuz is even compatible with Android Auto and CarPlay (beta).
On the negative side, Qobuz falls behind in the area of voice assistants; it is just not prepared to work with any of them, and that is a feature that I truly miss while driving.
Qobuz Sublime+
Aside from the standard Studio Premier plan, Qobuz offers Sublime+, identical to Studio Premier, except that it includes hi-res purchases at discounted prices. You pay a higher annual fee (no monthly subscription available) that gives you significant discounts on music purchases through the Qobuz download store. With discounts as high as 50%, the math may work out nicely if you are an avid buyer of hi-res music.
Footnotes
Qobuz (2020). Unlimited streaming offers. Available at https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/music/streaming/offers#plan-stream[Accessed 2020/01/23]