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CD v Streamed



Uncompressed CD audio will take about 10.6mb per minute to play, to stream that takes big space and dollars to stream an album, see what your streaming company’s takes mb per minute to stream, find out and post up here.

I hear CD’s are better, I get better dynamic range from CD every time it’s A/B to me, now that could be that the streaming companies are using the "later compressed re-issues" of the same albums, you can find that out here https://dr.loudness-war.info/
Or that the streaming process itself compresses the music to save "streaming size" to save big dollars even if in small amounts.

Here’s a video from the CEO of Disc Makers Pty Ltd, yes he probably also biased because he manufacturers CD’s and vinyl, and is a very bad dancer.
https://youtu.be/YHMCTUl2FQo?t=1

Cheers George
georgehifi

Showing 1 response by ejr1953

ejr1953
921 posts
 
I’d say the answer to "which sounds better" is "depends".

Let’s assume that the "chains" in your system sound equally good:

CD player/DAC = Streaming source/DAC

I find that often the hi-res master that’s available for streaming from Qobuz is oftentimes more-recently mastered and oftentimes does sound a bit better than the mastered version on my CD.

I also find that some of my SACDs do sound a bit better then the FLAC files from Qobuz, but that’s atypical.

More times than not, I will select the Qobuz version over my CD/SACD version.
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