Ok. About 3 years ago, I met Gus Skinas up in his Boulder Studio upstairs at the PS Audio factory. An amazing and very nice man to talk to. Did a great one hour Zoom session with our gang of six 2 years ago.
Anyways. My comment to Gus was. How in hell did I hear a clear difference between the SACD of any of the Elton John reissues that he mastered the SACD layer on and the Super Bit Mapped CD layer. My system 20 years ago was a Denon AVR-1802 Home Theater Receiver and a Pioneer DV578-A Universal Disc Player via its Analog outs to the Analog in of the AVR. The SACD easily sounded more LP like without the inner groove distortion and surface noise that I always hated on cheap LP pressings.
Now saying all that. In 2003, I bought both the LP & SACD of the 30th Anniversary Dark Side of the Moon. The SACD’s 5.1 is amazing but to my ears, the LP outclasses the 2.0 SACD. It’s not a night and day difference nonetheless.
As Gus told me. “It’s all in the mastering” and of course there condition of the master tapes.
I stream a lot via AmazonHD (I did a direct comparison to Qobuz - no difference in audio quality). Both companies are clearly adding some “spice” to the streams. The CD version always sounds better in most cases but not all.
As for high bitrate PCM ? Great for preservation but is it better than a CD. Again, depends on how it was mastered.
The Hendrix SACD’s are the best I’ve heard.
My DAC ? PS Audio DirectStream DAC Sr.