Sound Quality of red book CDs vs.streaming

Happy new year: I have been using a Berkeley Audio Alpha 2 Reference w/ MQA, spinning CD's on an Esoteric PO3 Transport w/ Shunyata Alpha digital AES/EBU. Jeff Rowland Chorus/PSU to twin Rowland 625's/Revel Salon 2 speakers. I love the system and prefer it sonically to Digital (borrowed a DCS Vivaldi to listen.) I think a very good system is as good as a digital file of equal quality. Certainly no reason to ditch a transport or  such.

I agree. I only use streaming for parties etc. Most of my listening is using Ethernet renderer with tracks spooled from locally stored .wav files. Beats any CD or SACD player. Much lower jitter possible.

Steve N
Empirical Audio

“streaming is fine for casual listening” 

@foxyrjd,

Do you mind sharing your steaming and  vinyl setup? 

After a couple of years with Tidal's and/or Deezer's premium tiers I went back to Spotify for casual listening. Like others here I've found the streaming services just don't measure up to my own library of ripped/downloaded files. I'm perfectly satisfied with this, Spotify has a terrific catalog and is a great way to discover music I'm interested in owning. I also enjoy Pandora and some internet radio streams.

@audioengr .. for quite some time I've read your posts about using WAV vs. everything else and was an unbeliever. I recently moved to a UPnP/ethernet renderer based audio solution and now understand. FWIW I only tried WAV out of frustration with UPnP, which seemed to stumble a bit with my uncompressed flac files. A suggestion was made to try WAV instead of flac and not only did it behave better but also sounded better to my ears. (Not trying to start a war here guys .. just my very subjective and non-double blind listening experience. YMMV.)