Majority Of Your Listening Is Online Streaming Service, Do You Buy CD's Or Vinyl Any More?


Do you care to own hard copies of your recordings any more?

128x128mitch4t

Vinyl yes. Still most preferred. CD’s not so much. Still stream though. I did just pick up a Sony SACD etc player, so I may play with some titles in those formats.

I regularly go to my happily tall, well-stuffed rack of CDs and ponder what I might listen to next. I have no idea how much of what I have is also available via streaming. I have entire symphony sets, compendiums of  Old Time Folk artists, operas, and off-the-beaten-track ethnic music. Many of the CDs have surprisingly good sound.

Streaming definitely has its place, but my CD collection is large, and in my system still sounds better than the quality of streaming.  It also has greatly slowed purchases of CD's (from about 50 per year down to about 5). 

If I hear some music (album) that I like, I certainly want to have it on cd.Streaming is like listening music from fm radio. If you are passionate about music (or about your collection of the music) than owning a physical media is a must, imho.

@mitch4t

 

My Audio Research Ref CD9se is also the best DAC I have ever heard, so it gets used in that capacity for streaming.

Also, I find Qobuz has 99% of my albums… and many hundreds of thousands more (well, seventy million tunes). So, if I read a review of a new album in Stereophile.. I’ll start listening to it while I read the review. Soon after you get your feet on the ground with streaming as good or better than CD quality you realize how absurdly restrictive owning physical disks is. You can start exploring bands like the ones you know of, which lead to discovery of music you never heard of… which leads to more discovery. Etc.