Did you notice....

I'm with @sns -- years ago I spent several weeks comparing, back-to-back, synced and level-matched, CDs against my local rips of the same material.  I was never able to tell a difference.  Then, about three years ago, I added a Qobuz subscription to the mix and ran the same type of comparison again between my material against the same songs on Qobuz with the same results.   

But, as with any piece of equipment in this hobby, different people reach different conclusions.  I like the way my setup sounds and enjoy having 80 million tracks at my fingertips along with the items in my collection that are no longer commercially available (or never were.)  Other people are chasing a different experience. More power to them! 

Cd rips on local files outperformed both my Mark Levinson #37 and modded PS Audio PerfectWave transports. Over time improvements on network and streams virtually indistinguishable to cd rips. This with over 3500 rips, so wide variety recording variables here.

@audiotroy

I checked my Amazon orders/returns and I was wrong it was Cambridge streamer I decided to try out for $1200+ and was unimpressed. It didn’t change anything vs conventional ipad.

Once again, If I have to spend eve-even more-more to get descent quality, than I’m right to staying with iPad to Mytek 192 DAC for streaming and listening to CDs as a better media.

Cziary Benchmark makes dacs not streamers

The streamig device going to the dac really matters wehada few Benchmark mark products teadedi n over the years they were sterile sounding so compared to another cd Player the dac . Might sound thiner

I'm sure some of you guys have good streaming systems but it's hard to do better than the original format. 

I don't consider neither Tidal or Benchmark as a cheap streamers at all, but if I have to spend a lot more to outperform CD, then it's extremely safe to assume that CD does sound better and in many cases a lot better. 

A great quality streamer can outperform a cheap cd player.  There are some noise problems with streaming that need to be sorted out, which you can do on your own now.  I think that the noise filtering will eventually be addressed by the makers of streamers, but if you prefer CD, there's nothing wrong with that.

I have vintage Carver Tl3300 CD-player with 1-bit DAC (got one from estate sales), I don't think that this CD-player is of any value, but it brings great sound and music.

I have Tidal streamer and tidal service, but quickly realized that I'm not getting satisfaction as I would get from my Carver player.

I tried Benchmark streamer, but decided to return it for small restocking fee instead of keeping it.

With streaming you are at the mercy of the services. They can use data compression to get their music streams to fit on the digital pipelines, particularly during periods of heavy usage.

I have had the same experience. CD’s sound better to me, I have a PS audio directstream DAC and a McKintosh CD player.