I Sold my CD Player!!! Streaming sounds so incredible!!!

This is great if you don’t mind someone else choosing the mastering / release version for you. I’m VERY picky about my cds, and of the half dozen versions out there of ’Captain Fantastic’ the only one I care to listen to was mastered in the 1980s.

And before you ask: the correct mastering makes a HUGE difference.

rbstehno

Which Sony CD/SACD player is in your collection?

Happy Listening!

@fpomposo  ......I've found the same thing.   I have the Eversolo A8.  The ripped CDs on the SSD is the best digital I've heard yet and better sounding than any streaming. So easy now to access the music. And I also found that WAVE sounds better than FLAC on that unit which is controversial but I certainly hear a difference.  After ripping all my hundreds of CDs to FLAC.  Arrrrggghh.

But now with these SSDs we don't even need a CD player.  I use a laptop that has a DVD/CD drive and rip to a thumb drive using dBpoweramp.  The quality of the CD player isn't a factor anymore.  

Streaming is easier than dealing with the physical discs but with them ripped it's now so much easier.  Gotta love technology.  

Streaming sound quality extremely dependent on entire streaming chain. Stream sound quality should equal rip quality once you have streaming chain optimized.

As for recording quality, all over the place, this for both physical media and streams. Streams often have the advantage in that there's often multiple mastering/releases of same album, this becoming increasingly rare as cd sales decline. Streaming services have deep enough pockets to allow access to nearly every recording ever made, and its far simpler to transfer these recordings to streaming service. Physical media requires pressings and much more difficult distribution chain.

When you all rip your 4000 cds or 10000 cds, do you throw the files willy nelly into a nas drive (hoping metadata will save you) OR do you organize a folder tree by root folder genre --’>> Artist name folder (alphabetical) ---->> Album names folder?? ....which is how cds or vinyl sits in the racks

If the Metadata tracker fails, why can’t you all simply browse by folder to get to your favorite song bird for the day? Seems like a common sense thought process/solution is getting buried by promise of a failed "Metadata" miracle....
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I have a standard protocol I follow religiously when I edit the metadata the ripping software produces.

under TITLE I enter the composer’s name followed by a colon. Then I enter the title of the composition. The TITLE entry typically looks like this:

Korngold: Die Tote Stadt <Disc 1>

My streamer organizes my albums as I wish so I organize by TITLE. Along the side of the alphabetical list of TITLEs is a key containing all the letters of the alphabet. To find my Korngold album all I have to do is press the “K” and I am presented with a list of albums that have a title beginning with “K” and scroll through them until I find all my Korngold recordings. Then I look until I find Die Tote Stadt and press the play arrow.. It takes seconds and I would bet I can do that quicker than you can get up to search your albums to find something similar and then put it in your player and press play.

The problem with classical is if an album contains more than one composer it only finds the first composer listed in the title. I have repeatedly suggested that when editing metadata, the software should provide for more than one composer by allowing multiple titles for an album. I’ll probably be dead before that happens so I try to remember those albums that have multiple composers.

To summarize:  I don’t accept the metadata entered by the ripping software.  I edit the metadata so it is in my standard format.  All my metadata is entered in the same way so I can easily find my music albums.