Half-Speed Masters - are they worth double dipping?

I have no opinion about half speed masters.

With contemporary recordings vinyl is a bit of a crapshoot. I would say over 50% of the time the vinyl is about the same as CD and just very slightly better than streaming. 10% of the time it is worse. The magic lies in the 15-25% of recordings that are clearly better. The fact that the music was digitally mastered is different from how the vinyl is mastered. And old vinyl is almost always better than streaming.

And while the assertion the vinyl has a lower possible dynamic range than streaming is true, the simple fact is many LPs do in reality have more realized dynamic range and sound better.

This guy does an amazing job measuring the dynamic range of a bunch of different media and you can see how widely it can vary between different releases of the same album. One interesting takeaway is how much less compressed most Atmos mixes are. My personal experience is that finding and streaming the Dolby Atmos version from Tidal over Roon is often quite a bit better than the normal version. That is particularly odd given that Roon doesn’t support Atmos so some conversion is occurring.

https://magicvinyldigital.net/

One final note, I was a true believer that vinyl couldn’t be better than streaming three years ago, but hearing other people’s vinyl setups and then building my own convinced me that some minority of the time vinyl was clearly better. The frustration is with all the recordings that sound exactly the same as streaming. Just as an example, forget about buying a Taylor Swift album on vinyl, it is a waste of money. But get Billie Eilish or Lorde’s first albums and the vinyl is a revelation. Side one of the recent vinyl reissue of Kronos Quartet "Black Angels" album is startlingly better than streaming. Of course, all of these differences do require a certain level of system to hear.

@drmuso I have also compared the MFSL American Beauty to Qobuz streaming but I found the vinyl to be better and easily differentiated. I’m open to the possibility that it was a psycho acoustic delusion, but generally I trust my ears in this situation. Vinyl side is a VPI Super Scoutmaster with JMW 10.5" tonearm with a Skyanalog Ref cartridge and Allnic H-3000 preamp. Streaming side is Qobuz/Roon from Eversolo A8 to Holo May KTE DAC. Both sides level matched by Roon’s LossLess Headroom adjustments and switched from an Audio Research 5SE. Personally, I wish I didn’t hear these differences since it would save me thousands of dollars a year.

@ghdprentice  I'm not quite sure what your point is.  

1) Most contemporary vinyl sounds very similar to streaming the same version/release, but some percentage, call it 15-25%, sounds better.  I think the MoFi release of American Beauty falls into that better category.  The fact that most vinyl and streaming sound so very similar suggests the difference in sound quality isn't due to the differences in my analog and digital front ends.  Whenever I play a new record I stream at the same time and carefully level match and compare the digital and analog source and make notes about how they sound.  

2) Why on earth would you try to get your vinyl and digital systems to sound the same?  If you somehow achieved that why would you ever buy a record again?  

3) I have frequently experienced variation between different copies of exactly the same record and I agree it is likely because of where that particular copy was in the life of the master.  Frankly, it pisses me off and is a source of frustration when it comes to vinyl.  It is bad enough that a record may be warped or pressed with cheap vinyl or gotten scratched in handling but the idea that the quality changes for two copies of exactly the same record makes me crazy  .