And while there's some truth to that, Qobuz really did pop. I suspected that Spotify and Tidal sound "good enough," and it would be hard to really hear the difference. Not because I didn't trust that its audio was high quality, but because I didn't think it would matter very much. I'll be honest: I didn't expect Qobuz to fare that well. The result? Qobuz noticeably outperformed the others as we picked Qobuz as our favorite in "blind" testing a surprising 75% of the time.
Two test subjects (myself, and fellow tech journalist John Lyon) got to hear each song once – the highest-quality versions of Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz – through a pair of high-quality headphones without knowing which version was which. To find out, we tested 10 songs that spanned a range of musical styles. So we put all three streaming services to the test to see if there was any noticeable advantage to using Qobuz.
Qobuz is different, though – it delivers (depending upon the track), high quality MP3s, CD-quality music, and 24-bit lossless tracks just as conveniently as Spotify and Tidal deliver their respective sounds. A few years ago, musician Neil Young tried again with Pono, a combination music player and music service, but not enough people wanted to lock themselves into a special music player, regardless of the superior sound quality it offered. In the last decade, formats like DVD-Audio and SACD have promised sound quality far surpassing anything on CD, but they largely failed because they were inconvenient compared to CD playing. Qobuz, new to the US, supports much higher audio quality – according to the company, as much as 29 times better than Spotify. But audiophiles are always on the hunt for better sound quality, and a new streaming service has debuted, offering to deliver it. Are you happy with the sound quality of your music streaming app? You might not think much about it.