For me I’d rather listen to different music every week than the same stuff I’ve listened to for 40 years. The only way to do this is through streaming. I never went down the vinyl route but I would be broke if I bought hard copies of all the new music I’ve discovered since getting into streaming 5-6 years ago.
The problem with streaming
As I sit here listening to America Includes: "A Horse With No Name", I realized the problem with streaming. Who knows what source material you're getting with streaming? The album I'm listening to is a Warners Brothers green label. Sonics are absolutely incredible! The band sounds like they're in the room!
Navigating the pressings to find the best one can be challenging but that's part of the fun of the hobby. I doubt the same care is taken when generating streaming recordings. You're stuck with what they use, thus missing the incredible texture of the best recordings.
Of course, great care must be taken to set up the turntable and match all components downstream. I find the effort to be well worth it! There's just no substitute for great analog!
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As has been said over and over and argued to the point of exhaustion. Streaming is not a replacement to vinyl but a compliment to all other sources of music a person has access to. For me I will take music any way I can get it. Yes there are delivery sources that are much better and enjoyable than others but don’t think they will ever create an isolation system that will allow me to play a album in my car. I still use and enjoy my Nakimichi Dragon cassette deck and the live radio concerts I recorded over the years. Many will bash this medium but I don’t care as I will take my access to music any way I can. Enjoy the ride, enjoy the music and wear a teflon coat for the criticism to come! |
Wow @sgreg1 now that Dragon has been well amortized down to penny a day. Well done. |
The original post, on its face, appears to be a reasonable cause of doubt. However when you consider the time and energy that goes into the process of professionally converting A to D, it involves a lot of time and money. A couple of years ago a very famous producer was in her New York studio with the family of deceased jazz artist. She commented how are after they had remastered at the 192/24 resolution, she said “he was in the room”. So I think IF a company or individual or insert the blank, takes the time and energy to remaster A masterpiece, wouldn’t they have the wherewithal to know that there are varying qualities of source material? It may be an assumption, but anyone that is serious about their trade and reputation in that field, you would think that they would want to source the best. If we humble (sic) audiophiles recognize that there is better media, why wouldn’t these professionals? BTW my Roon somehow switch the stream to Airplay, dumbing down the rez to 44/16. My wife commented “what happened to the quality of the music?“ It had been going into my preamp on HDMI. Gotta figure out how to get rid of an airplay… |
re: remastering engineers botching a job/using an inferior source, asking whether they "know" what they're handed is "the good one" seems kind of obtuse. some certainly do a great job, but with material outside of niche markets many engineers are probably just given something and they do their best with it. and their best might not be what an audiophile thinks is best. some go crazy with the compression and (an audiophile might say) wreck the dynamics because that's a sound that the artist or a label person wants/expects. others master for airpods, car systems, bluetooth speakers etc because that's what almost everyone on earth uses for playback these days. and a lot engineers are probably just regular people with a job to do, and some days may just phone it in |
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