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CD v Streamed



Uncompressed CD audio will take about 10.6mb per minute to play, to stream that takes big space and dollars to stream an album, see what your streaming company’s takes mb per minute to stream, find out and post up here.

I hear CD’s are better, I get better dynamic range from CD every time it’s A/B to me, now that could be that the streaming companies are using the "later compressed re-issues" of the same albums, you can find that out here https://dr.loudness-war.info/
Or that the streaming process itself compresses the music to save "streaming size" to save big dollars even if in small amounts.

Here’s a video from the CEO of Disc Makers Pty Ltd, yes he probably also biased because he manufacturers CD’s and vinyl, and is a very bad dancer.
https://youtu.be/YHMCTUl2FQo?t=1

Cheers George
128x128georgehifi
alexysflores
11 posts
 
In opinion both CD and streaming are digital format what it mean they don't produce excellent sound quality in my ears compared to analog vinyl.  I learned the expensive hard way by doing lots of buying and testing equipment from high to low end gears specially with DAC's one to get the right matching sound with tubes amps.  Once I got the right DAC, I was able to appreciate both devices but I would prefer streaming since I can choose right genre of music in my right mood of listening.
jhconnor's avatar
jhconnor
64 posts
 
I am relatively new to the streaming game. I just recently built out the digital side of my system. I have found that streaming an MQA file off of Tidal, or most of my high-res files on my NAS sound far better than CD’s through the same DAC. (Berkeley Alpha Series 3). However, CD’s sound better than 44.1 bit rate streaming on Tidal or Spotify. I’ve been truly blown away with how close streaming higher resolution files can be to vinyl. My two cents...
tennisdoc56
128 posts
 
The bias towards the physical medium of the cd is the nostalgia for physical medium, much like lp vs over the air fm.  The cd came out when a computer with 1k of ram was 999 dollars.  The reading of the cd even with the most high end transport had 5% error rates and dacs were programmed to guess what information was missing.  Even my car audio can stream with data already in a memory cache that is error free.
use your cd’s like a rom storage device and an asynchronous dac and you will lose the all the negative attributes of digital music
daleberlin
35 posts
 

Great topic georgehifi, im interested to see what comes out. Im not sure where you get your 10.6 megabits/min figure, but with Internet Providers offering 100mbps speeds, 10.6 mbpm is no problem. Please correct me if I am wrong, but here is my 2 cents worth.

I think duckworp hit the nail on the head. My RME ADI-2 FS DAC displays the bit rate of the stream it is processing from Qobuz. As duckworp pointed out, the bit rate tells us how much data is being streamed per second. When my DAC tells me it is processing 24bit at 192 kHz, I believe it. So 2 x 24 x 192000 = 9,216,000 bits/sec. My internet service provides 100Mbps, so streaming 24bit 192kHz is a piece of cake.

So the question becomes, why would Qobuz transmit to me 9 megabits/sec (24bit 192kHz) from a crappy highly compressed audio source file when it could send me 24bit 192kHz from the finest source available? Sounds like bad business to me. Remember, a CD is only 16bit 44.1kHz, which is 2 x 16 x 44,100 = 1,411,200 bits/sec.

From what I have read, Qobuz transmits FLAC files to me. I really don’t care what other people say, it is a FACT FACT FACT, that when a FLAC file is uncompressed, it is identical to the original WAV file it was created from (except for a few bytes of metadata ID). So unless the act of uncompressing the FLAC file is causing interference, the FLAC should sound identical to the original WAV file.

Looking forward to reading more reply, thank you.

Dale


relaks
63 posts
 
I am using Innuos ZEN to stream Qobuz music and also as a file transport/server. The stream quality is great, but when I really like something, I still buy a CD to rip it to the ZEN hard drive. Why? Because a ripped CD sounds better than a streamed FLAC file. 
And I don't think it is about the quality of the file, it is about what happens to it on the way to my DAC. I don't subscribe to the simplistic theory that a digital signal is just 0 and 1. If a USB cable makes such a difference, surely a router and the whole ethernet structure with its ground voltage etc. should affect the SQ. 

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