The (Qo)Buz About High Quality Streaming Audio (Part 1 of 2)

Qobuz helps listeners rediscover music

Overcoming some of the primary disadvantages of streaming audio services – low quality, limited and confusing choices and paltry payments to artists – a France-based music streaming service does one thing, and does it right. Available in the U.S. since 2019, Qobuz offers subscribers high quality audio, more than 100 million tracks and a payout model that honors those who make the music. The company’s service is designed for today, and poised for the future.

A Bit of History
The music industry underwent seismic changes with the dawn of the Internet. When the World Wide Web (as it was then called) debuted in the early 1990s, prognosticators heralded the dawn of a new era: they predicted fundamental changes in how information would be exchanged, how consumers would shop, and – with regard to media – how music would be distributed and experienced. But even the most forward-leaning soothsayers couldn’t predict just how massive a change was to come for the music industry. Streaming services would completely upend the marketplace, turning on their head many ideas about the nexus of music and technology.

The newly-developed and highly-compressed MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (MP3) format made it possible to create music files a fraction the size of WAV audio, so one minute of stereo audio occupied about one megabyte of file space. In theory, that meant an audio file could be downloaded conveniently. But in the early days of the Internet, many consumers connected over telephone lines, using modems that transferred data at extremely slow rates. For users with 14.4kHz or 28.8.kHz analog modems – the standard in the mid ‘90s – downloading one minute’s worth of MP3 could take ten minutes. By 1995, the typical rock album ran between 53 and 55 minutes; the idea of downloading an entire album in the “lossy” MP3 format would mean tying up one’s home telephone line for nearly nine hours.

Technological changes came quickly, though. By the early 2000s, many users connected to the Internet via broadband, allowing speeds ten times what they had been only a few years before. By 2009, a typical user in the U.S. could enjoy connection speeds of 5-7 megabits per second. That same MP3 file that used to take ten minutes to download could now be retrieved in seconds. Today in 2026, it’s not at all unusual for a home user to connect to the Internet at 300 Mbps; that’s more than 20,000 times the speed of that vintage modem of only a generation ago.

And what all those numbers mean to the distribution of data is that streaming – the real-time, on-demand delivery of media files – is a ubiquitous and convenient feature of modern life. It’s no longer a revolutionary idea to search online for a song or album, click on it, and start enjoying that music, all within a second or two.

But in the same way that FM radio presents a compressed audio signal that removes some data to allow for more efficient transfer, many of today’s streaming services still build their business model on delivering MP3 – not CD or better – audio quality. The basic subscription plans from many popular music streaming services available in the U.S. – Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and Amazon Music – deliver “lossy” audio. Even though most users have the bandwidth to accept large data streams, some of those music services do not offer a lossless or high resolution audio option at all.

Lossless Audio Enters the Chat
Into that music marketplace in 2007 came Qobuz (pronounced KO-buzz). Launched in France by a privately-held company, Qobuz has expanded to provide its service in 26 countries. Availability began in the U.S. in 2019. According to Dan Mackta, Qobuz’s Managing Director for North America and Northern Europe, Qobuz is “all about music.” Unlike some of its high profile competitors, the company, he says, “has no big-tech aspirations, no looking to use music as a vehicle to do something else.”

Qobuz began as an online download store, and that part of the service remains a part of Qobuz’s business plan. “We still sell [music] files, both hi-res and lossless,” Mackta says. When streaming began and all major services offered lossy files, Qobuz committed instead of offering only lossless, CD-quality audio from the very start. Seven years before Tidal rolled out its lossless audio service, Qobuz already pioneered the delivery of top-quality streaming audio.

Mackta recalls facing some skepticism when Qobuz debuted in the United States. “People were telling me, ‘Nobody cares about hi-res! Nobody cares about sound quality!’” But with some satisfaction he notes that shortly after Qobuz entered the U.S. market, “both Amazon and Apple Music started offering the same quality. They wouldn’t have started doing it if it weren’t good business. But we were the first.”

And Mackta points out that it’s not just him extolling the virtues of high quality streaming audio. “It’s artists, producers, mastering engineers – people for whom sound quality is how they make their living.”

A Companion to – Not a Substitute for – Physical Media
Like many of his generation, Mackta has a sizable collection of vinyl records and compact discs. And he thinks of Qobuz’s lossless audio as an extension of that personal collection. “Let’s say I’m listening to Yes’ Fragile on vinyl,” he says. “Then I decide I want to listen to Tales from Topographic Oceans, but I remember that I lost that album in a breakup 20 years ago.” As a Qobuz subscriber, “anything I think of, I can listen to,” he says. While the exact total changes every second with the addition of new music, informed estimate place the number of lossless audio tracks available on Qobuz in the range of more than 100 million tracks, on a par with Amazon, Apple, Tidal and Spotify.

“Physical media is not cheap,” Mackta concedes. And he bears that in mind when considering the purchase of new records or compact discs. For him and hundreds of thousands of fellow Qobuz subscribers, Qobuz is an important resource. “It’s a perfect way to preview music, to decide if you like it enough to plunk down 20 or 30 bucks,” he says. “And you’re previewing it in high quality.”

Most every title that comes out on physical media is also available via streaming, so for the listener considering purchasing (for example) a pricey boxed set, Qobuz can make that investment a much less risky proposition. “Plus,” Mackta says, “our human curation provides a good window into those new releases and reissues.” Included in the app is Qobuz Magazine, featuring original music writing, long-form articles and album reviews. Highlighting the eclectic, wide-net approach of Qobuz, recent informative and thought-provoking features in Qobuz Magazine include stories and interviews with Blonde Redhead, Lucinda Williams, Roger Eno, The Beths and Paavo Järvi.

While many streaming services expand their offering to include audiobooks and podcasts, Qobuz remains tightly focused on its core competency. “For now,” Mackta says, “we’re going to continue to focus on music, leaning into being a true music service.”

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