Hi,
Possibly some silly questions but bear with me.
I currently use Volumio on a Cubox-i with a Behringer UMC204HD USB sound interface, (capable of up to 192Khz 24 bit) and use it to play both a local library from a network share (a mix of iTunes M4A purchases and M4A rips from CD’s, and the odd 44.1Khz 16 bit FLAC’s) and Spotify.
I use the Spotify Connect 2 plugin and do not use the Volumio web interface itself for Spotify - I prefer to simply launch Spotify on my iPhone and send the songs or playlists to Volumio as a Spotify connect receiver, which then continues to play by itself when I exit the app on the phone. As the phone is not streaming the audio it doesn’t drain the battery of the phone as Airplay would.
All works great except for one thing - I’ve never been that happy with the Ogg Vorbis sound quality of Spotify even at 320Kbps. (I assume the Spotify connect 2 plugin is actually using the maximum quality stream settings - no way to be sure ?) As I’m a bit of a Hi-Fi nut who likes to build his own speakers and is quite fussy about sound quality the mediocre sound quality of most streaming services (at the time I joined Spotify many years ago) has always irked me. First I went from buying CD’s to buying 256Kbps AAC from iTunes, which was a step down in quality, then I went to using Spotify, which was a further step down.
However it was really brought home to me the other day when I found a bunch of CD’s I hadn’t played in a few years because I had the albums both as M4A rips and on Spotify. The improvement in sound quality playing the CD version of the album on a full size stereo over the Spotify version streamed via Volumio was quite dramatic - despite the fact that I was only playing the CD on an Xbox One to my TV and then routing analogue audio out of the TV as that’s the only device I have in the AV system with an optical drive anymore…
I like Spotify overall however they seem steadfastly against ever offering uncompressed FLAC format streaming let alone higher resolution formats so I started looking around to see what else there is besides Spotify who I’ve been with for many years.
A bit of research suggests that while somewhat expensive, Tidal and/or Qobuz have the best sound quality of any of the current streaming offerings while still having a good catalogue and good iOS app.
What is not clear to me however is what the user interface for using Tidal or Qobuz is like in MyVolumio - is it only controlled via the Volumio web interface, or do the Tidal /Qobuz iOS apps offer equivalent functionality to Spotify connect where I could launch the Tidal/Qobuz app on my phone and send a song or playlist to Volumio to play for me ?
I haven’t started a trial period for either Tidal or Qobuz yet until I figure out the Volumio side of things, so I can’t really check the iOS apps myself to see whether they support spotify connect-like functionality.
Any comments from those already using Tidal or Qobuz with MyVolumio and the iOS app on how it works and how they have found it greatly appreciated!