The Rapid Rise (& Fall) of the CD

I have no doubt that streaming offers better SQ than I can get from my vinyl and CD's. So many very experienced people have attested to that. However, I can not stream due to where I live.I get very unreliable and poor quality land line DSL service. I haven't saved money by not having to invest in streaming gear because I upgrade CD equipment along with the rest of the gear.  I am even toying with a TT upgrade from my VPI. Oh well, it never ends. I do like being able to go to my fave place, Music Millenium, in Portland,OR and perusing the vast wall of used CD's. And walking out with a pile of new to me stuff. Life is good.

I’ve gone back to CD’s because, to me, the quality is clearly better than streaming from Tidal the exact CD quality track hardwired etc to the same DAC. I enjoy not having a computer, phone, tablet, etc when I want to listen to music as my whole day is spent in front of a screen. A/B testing on my McIntosh MCT500 vs my computer, both hardwired into the McIntosh DA2 btw.

I have wondered whether errors in the music while being transported over the internet/server/etc just create more issues than a simple CD transport to the DAC. 

"I have wondered whether errors in the music while being transported over the internet/server/etc just create more issues than a simple CD transport to the DAC. "

The answer is no. The interent simply wouldn’t work at all if data were not transmitted accurately.

One thing that can occur is line noise getting into the connection to dac from streamer and causing jitter, however that is not a practical issue even anymore with modern DACs and streamers that are designed to deal with that effectively, ie are jitter resistant.

CD or streaming might sound better case by case.  The devil is in the details.

The Stereophile thread is more sophisticated on this topic. Thanks for the link.

BTW I have multiple streamers in several rooms of the house and have used wi-fi (wireless LAN connections) exclusively since I started streaming in place of CDs 15 years ago (wow how time flies).  These days I stream mostly with Roon and that includes high resolution files  up to 192 khz.  As long as the wifi connections are all strong, this works like a charm, sounds greate, and isolates my hifi completely from network wiring and any noise/jitter issues that might pop up there.