Tidal and Qobuz offer high-quality streaming, but which one is the best streaming service? Read on to find out my thoughts.
Price comparison between Tidal & Qobuz
Tidal offers two price plans consisting of either HiFi or HiFi Plus. HiFi plan provides music streaming at CD quality, while HiFi plus offers CD quality and better streaming and Atmos and Sony 360 reality audio playback on supported tracks. You can find full details and pricing plans on the Tidal pricing page.
Qobuz, on the other hand, offers one pricing plan which offers high-quality streaming with many tracks available for streaming at CD quality or better. You can find full details on pricing on the Qobuz pricing page.
Streaming quality of Tidal and Qobuz
As I mentioned in the introduction, both Tidan and Qobuz offer high-quality streaming, but this only applies to Tidal if you subscribe to the HiFi plus plan, which at the time of writing is significantly more expensive than the Qobuz plan.
In my experience, the Qobuz service offers the best sound quality of any music streaming service. As I said in my review of Qobuz, if your only concern is the sound quality, you can’t do better than Qobuz.
Music discovery in Tidal and Qobuz
Qobuz really struggles with music discovery and is the worst music streaming service I have experienced for finding new music. It does offer a range of playlists, including new music.
Tidal, on the other hand, is really good at music discovery. I especially like the daily music playlist, which suggests a number of tracks each day, though it occasionally throws a surprise suggestion in.
The user experience of using Tidal and Qobuz
The Qobuz user interface is well designed, and I didn’t encounter any problems using Qobuz.
The Tidal user interface is also well designed. Still, on occasion, I experienced issues with music not playing and wouldn’t let me change the hardware used to play the music. I could only get the music to play by reducing the streaming quality.
I mentioned my concern about this in my Tidal review, but I decided to continue to use Tidal for a while until I couldn’t listen to my music. Still, I didn’t want to reset my computer as I was in the middle of doing something. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, leading me to cancel my Tidal subscription.
Conclusion
I’m finding it difficult to recommend Tidal at the moment due to my experience using the application, even though I think Tidal has a lot going for it.
I was also very frustrated with Qobuz for how difficult it was to discover new music. If this isn’t an issue for you and you want to listen to the highest quality music stream, try Qobuz. I don’t think you will be disappointed.
You might be interested in our comparison of all music streaming services in 2022.