An interview with Qobuz’s Dan Mackta about getting the most from streaming and downloading

Shindig!: Our readers certainly love buying vinyl, both new and old, LPs and singles, and a large proportion still buy CDs, which they deem great value for money. How would you advise somebody who has trepidation about streaming to approach it?

Dan Mackta: I would tell people who have never experienced high quality streaming to think of it as a library. You can listen to as much as you want, but there is nothing stopping you from purchasing something that you want to have on your own shelf to keep. You already have the hardware you need to get started if you have a computer or a smartphone .

S!: Listening in the car or walking using 4G and a lower bitrate is fine, but for me, the serious way to enjoy Qobuz is to listen to the 24-bit high res files through the home stereo. I use a Node streamer and the quality is brilliant. For the uninitiated could you offer a few other recommendations of how to make the most of Qobuz in a home environment?
DM: Bluesound Node is good, there is also a new product called the WiiM mini streamer which also does full Hi-Res streaming. Every audio manufacturer is now making streamers or amplifiers with streamers built in, which allow you to listen to music in the system without hooking it up to a computer or phone. The other big recommendation we have for streaming Qobuz at home is hard wire your devices via Ethernet to your router for best results. Qobuz is not adaptive, which means the sound quality is not automatically degraded to match your bandwidth – and Wi-Fi inevitably is a weak point when streaming giant audio files.

S!:For anyone who has considered embracing high-res streaming and considered Tidal’s MQA, or your  CD quality FLACs and 24-bit files, Amazon’s and Apple’s versions, it’s quite confusing. Could you explain what each offers, and why Qobuz is the best choice?
DM: Qobuz streams the same audio files as Apple and Amazon. Tidal Masters uses a special format. I don’t know what other processing these services apply. I know Qobuz does nothing. No loudness normalisation, nothing. Music producers and engineers tell us they think Qobuz sounds best, and I trust their ears. The other thing that makes Qobuz different is we also offer a Hi-Res download store for those customers who want to buy digital albums in the best available audio quality. None of the others have this option.

S!: Each service has its strength and weakness, and most contain albums and artists that the others don’t. Will your catalogue be significantly expanding in the new year?
DM: At the current time we have over 90 million tracks in our library. There aren’t significant numbers of tracks to add, frankly. What we are doing is continuing to sign deals or arrange delivery from more small labels, as well as clean up holes resulting from various technical issues over the years. Our team is very small so this work is kind of whack-a-mole but it’s important. And Bob Seger will hopefully be giving us his full digital catalogue this year, he has been a holdout, not quite sure why.

S!: One thing that many of our readers like about CDs, particularly Cherry Red’s well thought out boxes, are the in-depth liner note booklets. If you could contain all of these it would be the icing on the cake. How likely is this?
DM:  We are able to display digital booklets right in all of our apps. The record labels have to send them to us though! Some distributors are simply not able to do it, in which case we can always add the booklets manually if we can get them from the label. We ask our suppliers to send booklets ALL THE TIME because we know our users really love them. But the it is in the hands of the labels.

S!: What’re a few of your picks from across the catalogue? 
DM: Here are some recent favourites and discoveries: