Tidal vs Qobuz - Battle of the Streaming Services

competition in the music streaming service Market is hotter than ever but most of the available Services seem to have pretty similar marketing points with over a 100 million songs most of them having lossless streaming available as well now so which one is actually the best well in the previous video we did a bit of a deep dive into Spotify and apple music and today we're going to be doing a deep dive into tidal and cobas if you haven't yet seen the first video I would recommend going and watching the SP versus Apple music video as it talks through some of the experiments that we'll be doing again in this video we're going to be comparing tidle and cobas in terms of sound quality Library size and looking at some of the extra features that they offer let's start with the music library this is a bit of a tricky one because most services including both tidle and cobas advertise themselves as having over 100 million songs and that's great but it doesn't actually really give you a particularly real world view of How likely you are to find your music and your library available on those platforms so so to come up with a bit of a real world experiment I asked DMS and resolve to each give me a playlist of songs that they listen to regularly from various different genres and made one myself as well and then I simply looked at what songs from these playlists were available or missing from each platform the three playlists have quite a wide variety of genres in them but bear in mind this is a fairly small sample size for a test so it's meant to be a bit more real world than just looking at the 100 million number but it's not necessarily going to apply directly to what you listen to I'll start things off with the good stuff tidle joins Apple music and Spotify in having an absolutely excellent Library finding 100% of songs on all three playlists cobas on the other hand has improved its Library quite significantly in the last two years or so it used to be quite restrictive to the point that whilst a lot of people I know would use it for the highres streaming as at the time it was one of the only services that had highres streaming available but they would still need to keep a subscription to something else to find all of the stuff that was not available on cobas and that has improved quite a bit but it's not quite perfect yet cobas was missing five out of the just over 80 songs that we tested for a 94% find rate in total so overall tidal gets the win for Library size you won't have any issue finding what you want on there cobas most stuff will be available but there will be a song or two missing here and there as we discussed in the last video streaming services like tidle and cobas are generally not intentionally changing how a track sounds they're not going to be eqing things for example and whilst they have guidelines for things like loudness for instance they're not going to be changing things to conform with those they are just guidelines and artists and labels are free to ignore them but even if an artist or label gives the exact same identical copy of a file to two different streaming services there are two factors that might affect what it sounds like when you play it back the first big factor is simply is the music streaming service you're using compressing the music that it's streaming to you this was a big factor in the Apple music versus Spotify debate because Apple music just takes the exact same file that the artist or label gave them and streams it directly unchanged to The Listener whereas Spotify in order to save on bandwidth and data compresses the music so information is lost and then it streams that to The Listener sometimes compression can be done very well to the point that it's almost indistinguishable from a lossless version you might not have noticed that I actually turned down the bit rate for my audio in this section of the video for instance but if you compress things too much it starts to get quite a bit more obvious luckily we don't have to worry about any of that with tidal or cobas because both of these services offer lossless streaming in fact not just lossless but highres streaming meaning tracks for where it's available up to 192 khz 24-bit can be streamed completely uncompressed straight to the listener that would not have been the case though if this video were made even just a couple months ago because whilst cobas has always had lossless and highr streaming available tidal whilst it had lossless streaming for a lot of its library in place of highres it used mql a or Master quality authenticated this was a file format that purported to offer lossless high-res quality in a smaller file format but in order to use it fully you had to buy a device which had mqa compatibility and that meant that that device had a licensing fee to mqa baked in as well the problem was mqa as it turns out didn't do half of what it claimed to do most of the marketing claims were complete junk and you can watch my video on the topic here where I actually published music on tile to get a deep dive objective look exactly what was going on the other problem with mqa on title being that even if you didn't have the subscription tier that allowed you to use mqa or if you just selected I just want lossless in the quality settings it would still just stream you the mqa file but with flagging removed so that your deck didn't realize it was mqa for any track where there was an mqa copy available there was no way to stream a lossless copy from tidal earlier on this year though mqa limited became insolvent and went into Administration and shortly thereafter TI announced that they are moving away from using mqa well I've got to look pleased now haven't I without being smug yeah you're not pulling that off the mqa files are being removed and in their place you will be able to stream native highres files and the 44.1 khz stuff that got converted to mqa for no good reason is being restored back to the actual lossless versions so now both tidal and cobas offer highres lossless streaming but the second factor is even if the streaming service is giving you a lossless file can you play that file bit perfect and lossless can you play it without your machine actually changing stuff and in the previous video we talked about how Apple music for instance even though it's streaming a lossless file to you cannot play lossless on Android or Windows and even on Mac you actually need to do a bit of tweaking in order to get it to play losslessly as well this is the results chart that we ended up with and now we're going to add title and cobas to this list on iOS due to the way that the audio stack in the operating system is set up luckily both Services can play proper lossless music straight to your deck providing that you have the volume all the way up if you turn it down then obviously it's changing things cuz it's altering the volume but if you have volume at Max it is indeed bit perfect for both tidal and cobas on Android though there's a bit of a problem which is that the Android operating system resamples all audio to 48 khz which means most music which is 44.1 khz gets changed and resampled to 48 khz and even if you have a hres file say 192 khz being streamed to you you can't really take take advantage of it because it's just being down sampled to 48 khz before being fed to your device unfortunately that is the case for cobas here so on Android cobas cannot play lossless music at all tidal on the other hand though has managed to get around this with a clever USB driver you can connect an external USB deck to your phone and the operating system will ask you if you'd like to give tidal exclusive access to that device and if you do tidle can then output to that USB deck bypassing the operating system mixer entirely nothing gets it's resampled it can play all of your music lossless all the way up to highres without being changed there is a slight workaround for cobas which is that if you stream cobas rather than using the official app using USB audio player Pro or Rune Arc both of those will allow you to Output as tidle does bit perfect to a USB device but just talking about the stock app itself cobas cannot play lossless on Android on Mac OS both Services can play lless but only if you manually go into midi settings and change the sample rate of your output device to match what you are playing through the streaming service if you don't do this then the operating system will resample your audio before feeding it to the deck and unfortunately whilst there's a really handy tool for Apple music specifically called lossless switcher which will automate this process for you so you don't even need to touch anything that doesn't work as far as I'm aware anyway for tidle and cobas which means if you want to play lossless on Mac you do need to be changing your output settings pretty frequently on Windows PCS the normal method of outputting audio is for a program to hand off audio to the OS mixer which is a service that mixes all of the different audio coming from all of the different programs together resamples it if necessary and then outputs it to your device but the problem is even if there is just one program running your sample rate is set correctly it's not bit perfect it does alter the audio that is going through it so in order to play bit perfect on Windows you need to use an exclusive output option but whereas Apple music didn't have a way to play bit perfect in l on Windows both tidal and cobas support wasapi exclusive which allows them to take exclusive control of any USB deck change the sample rate of that deck and output bit perfect no matter what they're playing one last thing to mention is that all of the results in this chart are assuming you have volume normalization turned off in your music streaming service a lot of streaming services will enable this by default it gives more consistent volume between tracks but it does mean that they are altering the volume of those tracks if you want to play back things completely unaltered make sure you go in and turn this off but what about extra features last time we discussed Apple music's dedicated classical music app for instance spotify's connect utility audiobook service and recommendation algorithm so what about title and cobas well when it comes to extra features neither of these two services are really doing anything all that unique except for one feature they both share that I'll talk about shortly title offers the ability to browse and watch music videos in the app and cobas is not just a streaming service but also allows you to purchase download and keep your music tidle also has something similar to Spotify connect called title connect which allows people to stream music to various different streaming devices if they support it though both tidle and cobas also support dnla casting by default anyway let's talk about something which is possibly the most important feature for many people the recommendation algorithm now this is something which is a little bit tricky to objectively quantify I can only give you my thoughts on the matter but as someone who uses both of these services and has done for years tidal in particular has gotten really good in this area it used to be that I found it inferior to Spotify for instance but now it's gotten really good to the point that it's on par maybe even better although I have used Spotify Less in recent months it offers my mix playlists with different moods so you can get personalized recommendations no matter what you're looking for in that moment as well as suggested new releases from artists it thinks you'll enjoy and generally the recommendations have been spoton there's also plenty of easy to use browsing featur Fe for charts editorial picks and browsing high as only tracks cobas on the other hand unfortunately really falls behind here it used to be for a long time that cuas didn't really have recommendations at all besides some editorial playlists and even though it now has a my weekly Q playlist personally I found the results I've gotten from it to be pretty hit or miss and it's often very pop music dominated no matter what you actually listen to there's also a bit of weirdness going on with manual browsing sometimes where if two artists have the same name the service gets a bit confused see this example with Bob Moses an electronic Duo that I listened to a fair bit and cobas thinks that they're the same as a drummer called Bob Moses and also mixes their discographies together so in terms of Music Discovery there is no competition title wins this one hands down the feature that both of these Services share though and pretty much the whole reason that I use these two in particular is that they have Rune integration Rune is a music player that seamlessly Blends your local and online libraries provides a wealth of browsing and filtering options a powerful DSP Suite it's something of the standard for high-end audio network streaming setups and also in my experience has Simply the Best recommendations of any service they've been better than any streaming services own recommendations including title and cobz despite the fact that I'm streaming title and cobas through Rune and the new releases for you section is even more personalized than titles for example and can be split into albums and singles it's just the best way to actually explore customize and enjoy listening to music in my opinion and this isn't sponsored Rune is just great these two streaming services having integration with it means that even if the streaming service is lacking a particular feature like decent recommendations built-in EQ or music credits detailed enough to tell you specifically who was playing the electric banjo in that track Rune will handle it both of these services are better than they are by themselves if you use them with Rune but just comparing them Standalone I think due to the combination of title connect better recommendations better manual browsing and an overall nicer UI in my view title wins hands down in the past when people asked me what streaming service should I use I recommended cobas it was basically the only option if you wanted actual lossless streaming daa didn't have and still doesn't have a bit perfect output Apple music didn't exist and tidal had all sorts of problems at the time but now things have changed and there's more competition tidle themselves have drastically improved their service by getting rid of mqa adding high-risk streaming adding bit perfect support on Android improving their recommendation algorithm and now there really isn't much reason not to go with tidal I hope you enjoyed that video and found it useful and if you've got any questions left over about music streaming services music gear or anything else at all head over to the headphones.com Discord server or the headphones.com Forum and I and other Wiggly air enthusiasts will endeavor to help until next time thanks for watching

Channel: The Headphone Show

Views: 62,966

Keywords: headphones, headphone, headphones.com, high end headphones, audiophile, best headphones, top headphones, most expensive headphones, headphone reviews, iems, iem review, amp, dac, audio, sound, qobuz, tidal, spotify, apple music, deezer, lossless, streaming, music streaming, itunes, music store, mqa, goldensound

Id: FRnOTtC9d_g

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 14 2024