Streaming vs Physical Media


I have a decent digital front end with a Lumin U1 Mini (w/ external power supply) and a Border Patrol SE dac.  Have some CDs, but no transport.  Would a CD transport sound better than a streamer of similar quality/price?  

mdonda

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.

Sorry GHD I can’t agree. Serving up this information would be rudimentary if they wanted to. If anything I have found a digression in easily available data. My understanding from research is that royalty rates are not the same for every track and hence there are business advantages to directing the consumer to specific versions not to mention that reducing the number of "popular" tracks allows vendors to reduce costs w.r.t to caching at various pops and the underlying bandwidth to support that further bringing down costs. Streaming is not really new at this point. Spotify, Google Music, Qoboz, Deezer are all over a decade old.

Well for me have a modest collection of cd's wanted a good player, Went with the Jays version 3.

Got a streamer, Byrston Bdp3 with Qobuz. The upper octaves are elevated as opposed to mid-range on down, Was ready to sell the Bryston stick with CD playback.

For curiosity, I downloaded Tidal, And the difference is Huge. Sound equals or slightly surpasses The cd tansport. really does. Im sold on streaming Tidal.