No, near enough is not good enough. I listen to music to get the greatest enjoyment I can. I do not look at equipment for the sake of looking at equipment.
Is Pretty Good Good Enough? Listening Habits In The World Of Streaming Services.
I'm a recent subscriber to Tidal and Amazon Unlimited. The sound quality of the cd quality music is surprisingly good. I find myself listening to more music because of it.
I've also found myself in a situation when I come across a very familiar recording that I find it missing some of the inner details of the recording that I'm very familiar with....overall, the recording is good, but I noticed the missing elements. Though I found it not as good as it sounds on my cd player, it was good enough that I didn't stop the song and went and got my cd and played it. In other words, I settled for pretty good. Interestingly, as I moved up the chain in the world of audio, it was always in pursuit of better equipment to extract better sound from the recording. I was always looking for better than 'good enough'. Well, 'good enough' has gotten a lot better than it used to be...and much more convenient.
Sadly, my critical listening time with my cd player and turntable is a lot less these days because of the streaming services. I've just started to fiddle around with burning wav files of my cd's to a hard drive to make copies of those recordings where nothing but the original file will do.
How have your listening habits changed since the higher resolution services have arrived?
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I have this debate often with my mate, while I admit vinyl on a quality turntable sounds great streaming from 24bit -192khz on my system to me sounds good enough that missing that one little top hat here or there etc doesn’t really change my life. I’m using Amazon Music HD. So far my system is Sugden A21SE amp, Denafrips Pontus II DAC, Audiolab 6000n streamer & KEF R3 speakers. I need a system I can operate from my armchair and this is so far where is has taken me. |
It's interesting you 'miss' something with the high res streams since they typically are of higher quality (24bit/192kHz) than CD (16bit/44.1kHz). If you hear a difference (very few people can ... do the test over here https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality ) it could be that you somehow prefer the lower sampling rate of the CD. The solution could be simple and cheap ... switch to the Tidal standard subscription. It could also be that you hear the differences between the DAC and the electronics of the CD player versus the streamer unit that you use. You could go on the lookout for another streamer / DAC combination that comes closer to the sound that you prefer. |
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