This is another attempt to create division in the Audio community. Why? because it creates more content. Physical media is my music playback choice. Streaming has a few years to go until it hits a level of refinement(SQ/etc.) that meets my standards. My main issue with streaming is 99%+ of music is unwanted why pay a service for a ,05% rented music play list. Many other time saving options exist for "finding" new music regardless of what year it was recorded. Music streaming(IMO) coincides with the cable channel flipper that wastes time sampling and finds nothing!
Do you agree with John Atkinson (and me)?
Point 1: In the recent thread entitled ’How much is too much to spend on a system?’, I contributed this comment: "The hi-fi shouldn’t be worth more than one’s music library." I said that half-jokingly, a wisecrack that I knew might be disagreed with.
Point 2: In the 1990’s I became a regular customer at the Tower Records Classical Music Annex store in Sherman Oaks, California. The store manager knew a LOT about Classical music, but also made no secret of his distain for audiophiles, whom he viewed as caring more about the sound quality of recordings than their musical quality.
Point 3: In the early days of The Absolute Sound magazine, the writers occasionally mocked audiophiles who had a serious high end system, but whose record collections merely consisted of a small number of "demo" discs. Those audiophiles collect records that make their systems sound good, rather than assemble a system that makes their records sound good.
I make the above points as a preamble to the following:
In the past few months I have fallen behind in my reading of the monthly issues of Stereophile that arrive in my mailbox. Yesterday I finally got around to reading the editorial in the January issue, written by John Atkinson (filling in for current editor Jim Austin, who is recuperating from surgery, I believe). The final two paragraphs of the editorial read as follows:
"Back in the day, I did an analysis of Stereophile reviewers’ systems. The common factor was that all the reviewers’ collections of LPs and CDs cost a lot more than their systems. The same is true of me, even in these days of streaming."
"Isn’t that the way it should be for all music-loving audiophiles?"
Well, is it?