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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If you enjoy streaming. Give yourself a Roon setup for christmas present. You can have both Tidal and Qobuz.

I just added Qobuz to my BlueSound Node setup, along with Tidal, Amazon and Napster.  Taking Qobuz for a 1 month test run..I will decide between Tidal and Qobuz and keep only one of the two.

I won’t be getting Roon for a while, BlueSound has everything I need for now.

I have never streamed.  Not once. Vinyl is high end enough. I can’t imagine any streaming service being able to match the dynamics of vinyl. 

Well, after working on power (Dedicated line) and the internet (Fiber, cascading switches, external LPSUs, clock, ENO filter) my Tidal became pretty pretty close to my tests playing CDs on a loaned Esoteric X05.  Most of the times I could not tell them apart.  So now I stream mostly, and play DSD files from my NAS, which is just slightly better than Tidal.