Sound Quality of red book CDs vs.streaming

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!

I highly recommend the latest generation of Linn Klimax DS with Katalyst DAC architecture or latest gen of Linn Akurate DS with Katalyst DAC architecture as well as various Naim DS with a separate Naim power supply unit especially the 500 series Naim. 
These are highly musical sounding digital front end source components and will outperform many high end CD/SACD players. 

You may find this will be better than all of them.

Naims new $25-30K flagship Reference R2R Multibit ND555 + power supply, network player still using the PCM1704 dac converters.

http://www.theaudiobeat.com/news/naim_nd555.htm

Cheers George