@jetter wrote:
I would never have thought that someone would make up bad things about any CD transport because there is a competition between CDs and streaming?
I’m not implying they make it up, but rather that the technical issues reported by a few are easily blown out of proportion and this way, implicitly, can act as an argument against CD playback more generally. Competition may be too strong a word, but certainly the taking of sides as it pertains to consumers comes in revolving around the old and newer/not based on a spinning CD way of transferring digital data to the D/A-converter:
There’s momentum and inertia to streaming as a natural evolution in digital playback, while conversely there’s the sense that CD-transports as a digital source in our present day hifi-milieu are a regression; physical CD’s take up space, they are susceptible to scratches, lasers wear out as do the associated drive mechanisms, they’re not "high-res," they’re bothersome, etc. Streaming on the other hand is devoid of mentioned mechanical hassles, offers an easier, more intuitive user platform, a near limitless musical repertoire at your fingertips, high-res files (for whatever it’s worth), a great way to explore new music, etc. On the face of it streaming has everything in its advantage.
However what streaming qua streaming offers in convenience, ease-of-use and vast musical repertoire is partially offset by the dependency on the streaming chain prior to the streamer itself and the demands placed here to harness its fuller potential, not to mention that streamers easily wind up as rather expensive affairs. By comparison a CD-transport is a more locally restricted and mechanically based source, and if the Pro-Ject transport is anything to go by - which it most definitely is as a singular item anyway - then excellent sound quality from a physical CD can be had somewhat cheaper than a streaming scenario with a similar file type.
And this perhaps is the crux of the matter: the difference in price (for similar performance). Among some there’s the insistence that different platforms that perform similarly-ish are also (or rather must be) more or less similarly priced. For some reason it rubs them the wrong way when the price here is not the same, not least if the platform they’ve chosen is the more expensive one. Even if one were to tell them they are effectively paying extra dough for convenience and ease-of-use (or maybe because of that) then those extra dollars invested - from their chair, willfully - still have to do with something additionally gained in sound quality. Which is to say: to them it’s not as much that price matters than that it HAS to matter.