" To the Qobuz crew: YOU ROCK !!! "

Le monde entier envie la France, c'est bien connu. Ses Châteaux de la Loire, sa Tour Eiffel, Amélie Poulain et Jean Dujardin, la place Pigalle, l'Arc de Triomphe, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, et maintenant... Qobuz !
De fait, c'est sur les forums anglo-saxons qu'on trouve des tartines assez élogieuses et souvent amusantes sur Qobuz.
Extraits en vrac de deux forums très respectés, www.computeraudiophile.com et www.gearlutz.com , ces commentaires et jugements sur Qobuz...

Goodbye Spotify -> Hello Qobuz!

" The difference between Spotify/MOG/Rhapsody/RDIO and Qobuz seems to be what the service is centered around, Qobuz feels music driven and that's I think one of the keys to long term survival. As a fresh new Qobuz customer I currently feel I'm going to be a lifetime customer, I have quit using all the other online streaming services, achieving what Qobuz has done really triggers a great deal of customer satisfaction right from the start.
Qobuz is a great example of how instantly the game changes. One great idea put perfectly into practice and the game has changed."
" I just purchased a 1 month Qobuz subscription for 29 EUR as a Christmas gift to myself and have so far had the best music experience for years playing with it! You just download the Qobuz desktop client, log onto your premium account, switch to lossless CD audio and off you go!!!
No hassle, just pure CD quality from an online music streaming service. And what a difference in music experience between listening to Spotify music in 320 kbit/s and Qobuz music in 44.1 kHz/s. Music is beautiful again... And all my favorite music is available! The MP3 period is finally over for good.
Will simply never go back. I highly recommend this, great stuff, a game changer!!!
" It's nice to see some more competition for iTunes, et al! Yes, the music streamed from Qobuz is in true lossless format (which is my point), so it's all good...!!! I'm on a very bad connection right now, all it does is to buffer for a few seconds in the beginning of each song and then it plays like a charm through out the whole song, no issues at all! This online music streaming service is incredible, a game changer!
The low end is fat and warm, the attack is soft, the stereo image is really full, the high end is very detailed and gentle, the reverb is really awesome and the depth is back! All the noise that Spotify introduces to the signal is simply gone now, it's just pure joy to listen music now! WOW!!!
ATTENTION ALL: QOBUZ WAS THE FIRST COMPANY IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND TO SUCCESSFULLY PROVIDE AN ONLINE MUSIC STREAMING SERVICE IN TRUE LOSSLESS CD QUALITY TO THE WORLD
UPDATE: I'm currently listening to some of the best sounding CDs I know just to compare and the sound quality is identical to what I'm used to on premise, I almost cannot believe it, this is really sweet stuff!!! I'm currently listening to Fourplay's song "Heartfelt" and the bass is just unbelievable, it just touches your heart in a very CD like way, awesome!!!
" FANTASTIC"
" Qobuz should be considered a "must have" among music lovers."
" In terms of the selection of lossless music currently available on Qobuz I would say it is big enough at this point to get enough customers attracted, there is great coverage in various genres and especially with a bit older music. Spotify currently has a bigger overall selection, especially when it comes to newly released content, but for the most part I find the music I want to play. Qobuz will have to work on increasing the selection of music to at least the same level as Spotify, that's critical. The cool thing though is that Qobuz has some albums in lossless format that not even Spotify has in lossy format, like for instance Brooks & Dunn - "Red Dirt Road", a great album filled with great songs. Or Fourplay - "Fourplay", a really nice sounding smooth jazz album... "

" Let's see, the cost of service is critical, for me 290 EUR / year is OK, I'm a music lover, so for me it's worth a lot...! In this way I can enjoy new music shortly after it is released, but without all the administrative hassle that comes with purchasing and playing CDs... I'm indexing all my favorite artists as Qobuz RSS feeds and by record label as well, so instantly Qobuz publishes a new record in lossless format by any of my favorite artists it will be instantly captured and consumed. On top of that I put search folders, so I can see what has been published today, yesterday, this week, this month, this year and so on... That's exactly how efficiently I want to consume music.
What I now notice also is that Qobuz is very active in adding new albums, I can see that on the RSS Feeds, the Qobuz service is being packed with new great albums as we speak...! "
" For me this is a dream come true...
Well, even though it is a bit behind Spotify I think in practice they are not far behind. Qobuz's music library is much bigger than one could imagine, to give you an idea of how big the Qobuz library truly is right now they have albums from approx. 12600 record labels, EMI is the biggest one contributing with 22006 albums alone... They seem to have albums from all the biggest record labels out there like EMI, Sony BMG, Island Def Jam, Universal, Capitol, Columbia, Arista Nashville, MCA Nashville, Mercury, Warner Jazz, CGD East West Italy, Word Entertainment... So imagine that you could step into a music library with unlimited access to that many records at your disposal and counting, and all in CD quality behind a few mouse clicks and without any hassle at all, that's what you get for 290 EUR/year. It's amazing! "
" I have been years waiting for Apple to start selling Lossless on iTunes, but they are more invested in HD Video for now."
Nice find!!!
Great, I think you should purchase the subscription, it's a great investment! This adds a whole new dimension to the music experience, I'm now planning to do a larger Hifi sound system investment, with this much high quality music available from home you get a completely different return on investment... "
" Getting true CD quality from an online service straight to the mobile device like this with no connection issues is a very impressive technical achievement! As far as I know Qobuz is the first provider ever to offer such a service! No need to use any mobile CD player or carry CD boxes with you anywhere anymore! And it sounds AWESOME!!!
Bye bye MP3s. Qobuz is changing the game forever!
To the Qobuz crew: YOU ROCK!!!
UPDATE: I've had the time to try out this now, the software is rock solid and the sound quality is great! I had to stop for a while and really reflect on what this truly means...this is the best thing happening to music in this century. People can now always enjoy all their favorite music in uncompromised CD quality on the go wherever they are. Totally freaking amazing! "

" I just purchased a 1 month Qobuz subscription for 29 EUR as a Christmas gift to myself and have so far had the best music experience for years playing with it! You just download the Qobuz desktop client, log onto your premium account, switch to lossless CD audio and off you go!!!
No hassle, just pure CD quality from an online music streaming service. And what a difference in music experience between listening to Spotify music in 320 kbit/s and Qobuz music in 44.1 kHz/s. Music is beautiful again... And all my favorite music is available! The MP3 period is finally over for good.
Will simply never go back. I highly recommend this, great stuff, a game changer!!! "

Cet intéressant résumé des avantages du LossLess par rapport au MP3 et aux formats compressés :
" Here are the additional qualities you get with lossless audio:
- More mix resonance: Modulations of individual instruments are preserved, natural resonance between elements in the mix are preserved, creating a more natural/harmonic listening experience
- More mix depth: Instruments sit in between each other in the mix, creating a lot of space for ambience frequencies, this in turn creates a natural listening experience
- Softer transients: The snare and kick sound is completely different now, very mellow in comparison, this creates a pleasant music experience, you can increase playback volume and it still doesn't sound noisy
- Cleaner frequencies end-to-end: The low end is vibrant and full off life, the mids are airy and clean, the highs are clean and less packed/more lush, this creates a beautiful listening experience
- Clearer vocals: Often vocals consume the most mix signal and therefore the difference is very big when it comes to vocals, they are more rich in harmonics and reverb (no nasty modulation artifacts in the way), this makes vocals as well as the whole mix more powerful sounding
- More emotional: Now when I'm listening to music I notice how the emotional return of listening to music has gone up. I now get more and different feelings to songs I thought were lifeless before, songs come alive in a different way. Music rocks again...
Other effects - I listen to more music now. I like more music now. I tend to like some of the music I didn't like before, some of these songs now become my new most played songs. I can't stop listening to music as easily. I am excited about new albums being published, new or old they all tend to sound amazing now! It's simply just so worth it and so fair to both artists and music in general...
Using my headphones the difference was like night and day, but when I connected Qobuz to my hifi system, oh my, ahhh so stunning... So for me this has been one of the most exciting new music toy I've come across over the last ten years, a whole new dimension of music experience is opening up. "

Quelques recommandations d'un passionné :

" I recommend that you avoid outputting the sound directly through the native sound card in your notebook, because even "high definition" audio devices coming with modern notebooks tend to pickup a lot of noise from the surrounding components and the quality of the D/A conversion itself might also not be the best.
The difference is that the music turns quieter/cleaner/more balanced/smoother, so the listening experience turns even more pleasant. I'm outputting the audio on my laptop through a firewire 400 connection to my RME Fireface 800 sound card and from there to a warm sounding analog mixer that allows me to fine adjust the frequencies with the room (I have a really great back end section bringing out those low end frequencies exactly like I want), and from there out to a high quality hifi sound system which has some really nice amplification components in it. If I use an SPDIF coaxial connection from RME Fireface 800 directly to my hifi sound system without any analog mixer in between, then some of the warmth is gone, I lose control over the frequencies.
Also, I have set my hifi sound system in Dolby Pro Logic mode, I really like that mode, which seems to bring out stereo elements a bit more isolated, with my 5 speaker front end system I'm able to pull out more background vocals on the sides by increasing the volume on the speakers that play those frequencies, while the vocals turn extremely well defined in the center. The final result is warm, wide, clear and pleasant. When I'm turning up the volume it's like going into space, you feel lighter and lighter as the sound waves encapsulate your being more and more. A very awesome feeling!
One thing that needs to be mentioned in tuning my playback sound to awesome quality even in a very small "woody" room is my work on speaker positioning. Lots of hours have gone into tweaking the position of every speaker. This is extremely important. When I now look at the final positioning of the speakers it seems odd that it would sound awesome the way they are positioned, because they are not perfectly symmetrically positioned. They are a little off in different ways, looks really funny. But oh my when I start playing... One recommendation regarding the low end is to use two perfectly positioned subwoofers in stereo, preferrably with soft clipping properties because these must make the kick drum (or low end transients) extremely soft, I know a lot of subwoofers that can't do that... But when you have such subwoofers and an analog mixer in between, then just boost the low end on the mixer until the whole mix sits in pillows... The nice thing about this is that you can raise the low mids as well and as soon as it turns noisy you just turn down the volume on the subwoofers... Left you have a huge low end section which is very soft and contributes to the stereo image as well. My configuration now sounds really good an all volumes and across all songs, I don't have too much or too little bass, always exactly as much bass as I want... In order to improve my playback sound from here I would have to replace everything about my setup, the room, the treatment of the room, the amplification, everything, plus I would have to put a 0 at the end of the final setup price. Even if my current playback quality is awesome this would improve my sound to a completely different level because I've tested it, which is why I'm considering it... "