Canada got a new streaming music service today. Introducing Qobuz, a completely high-res offering
Not satisfied with the audio quality of Spotify? Don’t want to be part of the Apple ecosystem? Not crazy about the user interface with Amazon Music? Then maybe you’ll like Qobuz, the France-based high-quality music streaming platform, which is finally available in Canada fifteen years after its debut. The service went live this morning making us the 26th country to be served.
(Weird name, right? Qobuz? But there is a story. The name comes from one of these.)
“Great,” you say, “Another streaming service. What’s the big deal? How are they gonna woo anyone away from Spotify?” Good question. But if you want the most out of your music, you might want to take a listen. Qobuz has been offering high-resolution streams since at least 2013. That means uncompressed, full-fidelity audio that’s at least as good as a CD–and often better at 24-bit high-res at 192 kHz (the bit depth CDs is 16 and the sampling is at 44.1 kHz. And yes, you can tell the difference. )
The entire catalogue is lossless (i.e. high-res) which, along with similar offerings from Tidal, should make this a favourite streamer for audiophiles. Another feature is Magazine, an online place for artist interviews, deep-dive articles, and a section dedicated to hardcore hi-fi people called Qobuz Club. There are also plenty of carefully curated playlists.
The service works on computers, phones, and tablets.
Skeptical? Then give it a free trial. Subs start at less than CAD$11 a month.
Have been looking forward to this.
There are still quite a few albums on Qobuz that are tagged with “Download not available”, so I’ll still have to continue to purchase flac files from multiple online stores. I suppose it’s not all that different from the pre-MP3 days when I bought CDs from different brick-and-mortar shops.