Why Do ~You~ Still Play CDs?

I now exclusively stream music. Here are some comments on why and some responses to other opinions.

If your CD player sounds better than streamed music it’s probably because you have not optimized your streaming set up. If you are still using a computer as your source, even into an external Dac, I am not surpised to hear that your CD player sounds better. Get a good dedicated streamer and you will likely change your mind.

The argument that streaming is more expensive is not my experience. I pay way less money yearly for my Tidal subscription than I spent yearly on CDs.

Streaming easily allows for listening to my favourite music with easy portability. I don’t need to drag physical media between my systems and when I travel my phone, portable DAC, and planar headphones provide a vastly better experience than in the days of portable CD players.

Lastly, my music listening time is precious, my sound systems are quite decent and revealing. A recording is only as good as the skills of the recording engineer and mastering engineer and a reflection of what they and the artist treid to achieve.

A lot of great music is poorly recorded. If I want to listen to an artist that has a large body of work, with streaming, I can favourite albums that are satisfying both musically and sonically, granted this applies more to jazz and classical where catalogs can be large compared to other genres.

For example, live Greatful Dead, Joe Pass, or Beeethovens 5th.....many many choices , Imagine Dragons Night Visions, only one poorly recorded one.

Of course good music badly engineered is always better than bad music perfectly engineered. With streaming I can have it all, here, there, and everywhere.

Got tired of ticks, pops, warps, SRA, VTA, protractor, alignment, anti-skating, force, cleaning, no remote, getting up to turn over record...

Sold my last turntable after I bought my first CDP and have been a happy camper ever since.

Listening to music at home on a great system is a wonderful experience.  But it is still a substitute for a live performance where all the musicians are sharing same space with you..  Physical media does provide a gradient where you do have something in between the live performance and enjoying the presence of music at home -- a tangible element to hold in your hand(s) that represents a reasonable facsimile of the actual performance.  While an electron microscope won't let you see all the musicians that performed on the CD, the CD does allow to you physically attach yourself to musical genius, a piece of cultural history, or something that fully resonates with you.  Or, perhaps those you shared the experience with who are no longer with you?  Liner notes elevate the emotional attachment to this phenomenon even further.

Life is full of successes and failures.  A broad CD (or vinyl) collection validates the good decisions you've made in life.  Their mere presence at this time is a validation of the good choices you've made along the way.  Things have come and gone, but those CDs are still there, ready to bring you pleasure on demand in a moment's notice.

And, finally, each CD in the collection represents a chuck of your life where there you were, standing over that CD bin looking for that target CD, or just shopping to find that hidden gem that would be special to you -- even if it's not on the Top Albums list of <fill in the year here>.  Standing at a distance and glancing at your CD collection (displayed in your storage system of choice) is not just looking at your CD collection.  It's a view of your life.

Yes, streaming gets you from 0-60 quicker.  But, as they say:  "It's not the destination.  It's the journey."

“cds sound better than streaming”

That statement has little to no merits. So many variables one must take into account…is it due to medium itself or playback equipment or laziness on someone’s part to setup a good streaming system.

Even an identical album would sound different through Vinyl and CD’s, then why consistently ding Streaming. The only knock on Streaming should be the ‘unknown provenance’ of recording being streamed and secondly, artists are not being compensated appropriately, IMHO.

Streaming, when done right, can indeed rival or even surpass physical media. I listen to CD’s, Streaming and Vinyl. You’re welcome to bring your best SACD/CD’s for a chance to hear how good streaming can sound :-)

Thank you @soix! That's what I'm hoping my Hermes will do. I have about ~20 hrs of play time on Hermes so I haven't sat down for a critical audition to see the difference. Ran into my slight noise/distortion issue which I am dealing with as you know...But I'm going to let her play all day tomorrow and then sit down tomorrow night hoping to hear the difference (with no distortion on certain tracks). I'm hoping bypassing Symphony with USB direct to Hermes will do the trick as I only noticed the distortion on certain tracks while streaming...

That said I will always LOVE my CD's...