Sound Quality of red book CDs vs.streaming

I have a Cyrus transport.  Both the Arcam and Cyrus are run the a Schiit Gumby DAC.
  I’m actually streaming Tidal, IDAGIO, Qobuz, and Spotify at different times.
(All But IDAGIO are trials.) Tidal seems to be the best.
I don’t know about loudness compensation.  I never implemented it.

Just found “loudness normalization” in Tidal and disabled it:  immediate improvement! 

The default position in Tidal is “on”.  The reason is so someone listening to play lists doesn’t need to constantly adjust the volume for each song.

You must go into the Tidal app to turn it “off” for critical listening.  It is easy to do. You can easily switch back and forth as needed.

Some observations about the different streaming services for classical music:

The best of course is IDAGIO because it is designed for classical.
In classical works oftentimes there is no gap in between the tracks.
Idagio, Qobuz and Spotify don’t insert any gaps, Tidal does.  That ruins the continuity of the music.  On Tidal, also, it is very difficult  to find specific works by composers.  Their search engine just doesn’t do that job well.   Again, the best is IDAGIO, as it has many search engines.  The other two services do a fair job.
 I, at first thought SQ was the best in Tidal, but in classical music anyway, they all seem pretty equal.

rvpiano

Thank You for sharing your point of view on the whole dedicated player vs. music server/streamer.  Keep 'em spinning.

Happy Listening!