CD or Streaming... am I missing out?


I listen to CD in my headphone office system. Use a Theta Compli transport and a very nice and pricey tube 16/44 DAC. Have thought about a streaming capability and all its benefits but am both limited by SPDF and by 16/44 only. I also love the analog sound of my tube DAC. Does streaming sound far surpass CD? Am I missing out?
mglik

I recently replaced my Theta Miles CD player with a Bluesound Vault 2i and have loaded all of my CDs onto it (over 1000.) Note that I demoed the Vault against my CD player (attached to a Krell KAV 300i integrated amp and Thiel CS2.2 speakers) for several weeks before I purchased it, in addition to having many friends and family do blind testing between the Vault and the Miles CD player. The bottom line was that there was no discernible difference in sound quality. The vault sounded every bit as fantastic as the CD player did. The advantage of having all types of access to all of my own music as well as the all the music available on streaming services, at the touch of a finger, is simply superb!


llarry

Correct me if I'm wrong but looking at what you said sounds like the same dac wasn’t used in this A/B so how can anything be establish?  

Cheers George
So here's the weird thing... This thread got me comparing stuff. I run Qobuz hi-res through a Cambridge Audio Azure851N streamer/DAC. Today, I hooked up an old, but good CD player (Linn Classik CD, integrated CD/tuner/amp). Not a really upper-upper-high-end device, but not garbage either. I use it as redbook player only, feed SPDIF into the same streamer/DAC. 

Now for the weird bit: the CD player sounds substantially better than the Qobuz FLAC at the same sample rate. Beter soundstage, better definition. How? Why? If i assume that Qobuz doesn't f*ck up the ripping proces, why is there such a difference?

</puzzling>

The pros and cons with Streaming and Pc/Computer music is that you can mix and choose various artists and playlists, but a Big Con is that you loose the Album feeling from Cd and LP.