2. digital
  3. 166623-94555

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
128x128georgehifi
rixthetrick's avatar
rixthetrick
1,060 posts
 
Seems like reasonable subject matter to be aware of as a consumer of music, considering the cost of the playback systems people here are using.

Consumers are paying for access to music, where streaming of files like MQA are supposedly offering superior playback, when in fact it may not be the case.

If someone prefers not to be informed; perhaps this forum, or at least this thread is not for you??
do you feel a need to “re-educate” people that they shouldn’t be enjoying playback that you subjectively view as inferior?
It seems that the growing collective experience is it's not just his subjective view, it's something that I and others also claim from listening.

sns
3,107 posts
 
I've found maximizing a streaming setup is a complex undertaking.  Audiophilestyle forum was my go to for understanding the process. At this point I'm rather agnostic as to preference for my well over 2500 cd rips on Synology NAS vs. streaming Roon interfaced with Qobuz and Tidal. I'm also agnostic about superiority of high res vs 16/44, quality of studio mastering is the biggie!
alexysflores
11 posts
 
In opinion both CD and streaming are digital format what it mean they don't produce excellent sound quality in my ears compared to analog vinyl.  I learned the expensive hard way by doing lots of buying and testing equipment from high to low end gears specially with DAC's one to get the right matching sound with tubes amps.  Once I got the right DAC, I was able to appreciate both devices but I would prefer streaming since I can choose right genre of music in my right mood of listening.
jhconnor's avatar
jhconnor
58 posts
 
I am relatively new to the streaming game. I just recently built out the digital side of my system. I have found that streaming an MQA file off of Tidal, or most of my high-res files on my NAS sound far better than CD’s through the same DAC. (Berkeley Alpha Series 3). However, CD’s sound better than 44.1 bit rate streaming on Tidal or Spotify. I’ve been truly blown away with how close streaming higher resolution files can be to vinyl. My two cents...
tennisdoc56
128 posts
 
The bias towards the physical medium of the cd is the nostalgia for physical medium, much like lp vs over the air fm.  The cd came out when a computer with 1k of ram was 999 dollars.  The reading of the cd even with the most high end transport had 5% error rates and dacs were programmed to guess what information was missing.  Even my car audio can stream with data already in a memory cache that is error free.
use your cd’s like a rom storage device and an asynchronous dac and you will lose the all the negative attributes of digital music
More to discover