Streaming vs Physical Media

@mahler123 Very succinct point. I agree 100%.

There should be no wi-fi hassles. Because for the very best audio everything should be wired (with the exception, of course, of the control tab or phone). Ripped CDs should sound better than CDs on most players and at least as good as CDs on the very best, and very expensive, players.

And as @mahler123  writes, when you are beyond the reach of the internet you can have the media on your phone. Or you can have gigabites of media on a small USB disk in your pocket. You don’t have to carry around a CD player and buckets of disks.

I have both an SACD/CD transport and Roon Nucleus Plus streaming server and I'd say, in terms of SQ it might be a "toss up".  They both are connected to the same DAC.  One thing that might be a plus for streaming is that, sometimes the CD I own is from an older master and my Qobuz version is more recently mastered and sounds just a bit better...probably being that it was mastered on newer, better equipment.

The hardest thing with streaming is the providence of the recording. I think streaming services purposely make it difficult to quickly find specific recordings. I find when I am comparing a specific recording (and volume levelling is off) there is no difference from CD and streaming.

Coming from the a background of information processing and managing huge programming and systems implementation projects, I assure you it is not purposefully hiding information about the recordings. It is a question of providing what the customer wants the most as fast as possible… and adding “nice to have” features later. This is a new highly competitive field… in ten or twenty years you will probably be able to find any version or mastering you want. If there is a service that will provide this data… and multiple versions first it is Qobuz.