Unless you fancy hefting around a record player wherever you go, streaming is a musical fact of life. It’s how pretty much everyone under the sun appreciates their music these days, whether that’s listening from your phone, your all-in-one streamer, or your complete, cutting-edge, multi-room set-up.
It’s obvious why that’s the case; as long as you have an internet connection, you can stream. It means you can take your music with you wherever you go, and better yet, have access to more music than you could ever listen to in a lifetime. But there is a downside – or at least, most of the time there’s a downside and that’s quality.
The general perception is that streaming means low quality. Spotify might give you access to a back catalogue par excellence, but the flipside is that you’ll need to deal with about as much musicality as a tone deaf busker. But that’s not all that’s out there. Far from it in fact, as Qobuz offers the largest hi-res streaming catalogue around.
To put into numbers just how much better hi-res audio is: MP3 plays at around 320kbps. That’s not great. CD plays at 16-bit, a vast improvement. But hi-res adds on half again at 24-bit. That means your ears have that much more sound to work with, with less white noise, less fuzz and more nuance and emotion in your music.
Obviously a lot of sound quality comes from what you’re listening on. A cheap pair of inflight earphones aren’t going to have the same sonorous acoustics as a top-end pair of Sennheisers, or the sensuality of a pair of Sonus Fabers. There is a limit to how far high fidelity sound can take you. But if you’re ready to up your game, Qobuz’s emphasis on quality will make the most of whatever you’re listening on.
It’s a level of fidelity that Qobuz believe in enough that they don’t do MP3 at all. Instead, all the music on the platform is CD-quality or better. In fact, they were the first service in the world to stream CD-quality and have one of the largest collections of hi-res songs on the planet. As the old adage goes, a stream cannot rise above its source, so you want as high resolution a source as clear as a mountain stream.
Because of the sheer number of songs and albums on offer (there are over 100,000,000 available), it can be daunting to find the music you need right now. Fortunately, the Qobuz app is one of the most handsomely ergonomic out there, clean and usability led. It makes scouring playlists and artists’ back catalogues much more straightforward than your alphabetised vinyl collection. That’s complete with easy notation for hi-res and CD quality as well as bitrate and frequency (also shown on the playback bar), so that you know you’re listening to serious high- fidelity. Oh, and if you want to own the tracks outright you can, and get up to a 60% discount doing it with a Qobuz Sublime (as opposed to the standard Qobuz Studio) subscription.
As for what you can play it on, thanks to Chromecast, you can use Qobuz on virtually any device – including the archetypal multi-room system of Sonos – so that you can take your music with you wherever you go, whether that’s on your morning commute or just into the next room. Because no matter what, your ears deserve the best sound possible. Qobuz Studio from $10.83 per month Qobuz Sublime from $15 per month.
More details at Qobuz.
