Qobuz Still In Beta – See Them at Florida Audio Expo
MP3, CD and Hi-Res FLAC
Qobuz and Florida Expo
Qobuz, one of this shows sponsors, and its first show in the America, will be announced at the Audio Expo as the first certified Hi-Res streaming and download service. The show is to be held at the Embassy Suites by Hilton at Tampa Airport Westshore, Florida. It will provide well over 120 exhibitors spread across seven floors of audio nirvana and is scheduled to take place Friday 8th Feb. – Sunday 10th Feb. 2019. It is free to all.
Qobuz is based in Paris and was founded in 2007. It currently provides both streaming and downloading services with three quality tiers to music lovers in eleven European markets and now soon to be in the US. The subscription service provides a huge range of genres and exclusive editorial content from more than 40 million tracks at CD quality, 2 million of which support 24bit/192K Hi-Res streaming in FLAC.
Qobuz is said to launch in the US in early 2019 and their web site is still offering beta trial enrollment should any vacancies arise. Their service include both streaming and downloads at three different levels of audio quality:
- Premium – MP3 320Kb/s -$9.99/month
- Hi-Fi – FLAC 16bit 44.1KHz – $19.99/month
- Studio – FLAC 24bit up to 192KHz – $24.99/month
Discounts are available for annual purchase.
Sublime+ is a fourth option that is available as a subscription service. It gives you access to the largest catalog of albums in Hi-Res and CD quality, both in streaming and downloads.
In advance of their launch, Qobuz will be available to listen to on a number of vendors products during the show and they are offering daily raffles for free subscriptions. All Expo attendees are also eligible for a number of other free daily raffles.
Show Hours:
- Friday, February 8. 10 am – 6 pm
- Saturday, February 9. 10 am – 6 pm
- Sunday, February 10. 10 am – 5 pm
My 2 Cents.
Based upon my personnel experience and many well argued comments and technical measurements from sites like Archimago’s Musings, it sounds like high res LPCM is definitely, if not the only way to go for audiophile digital media. (See his latest measurements of the Oppo 205 SACD and LPCM playback here.) I have spent thousands of hours listening to LPCM, SACD and enough time listening to MQA discs, files and streaming MQA from Tidal. Unless the source is already excellent quality, MQA encoding, in my opinion, provides very little benefit for streaming or disc playback other than more complexity and a whole host of other ‘issues’. See my comments on MQA in the following posts:
- High Resolution and Master Quality Authenticated Audio – MQA
- 2018 MQA Update
- MQA – High Res Audio Streaming’s Holy Grail
With the ‘network pipe’ to the home now up to 1Gigabit/sec, and 5G, compression is no longer necessary for streaming. Nor is it necessary for storage as its pricing plummets by the day. So while SACD is still, in my opinion, an excellent encoding technique providing some stellar audio, Hi-Res LPCM 24bit 192KHz, is just about as good as it gets and is close to, or at, the limits of our auditory system.
