Who listens primarily to Redbook CD?

LP and CD in equal measures, CD being mostly 16/44. I had been getting more and more heavily biased towards LP as far superior SQ until the power supply I had been working on was tested for the first time. This revealed that digital suffers quite badly from it's mains power connection. The transformation of the sq from digital needs to be heard to be beleived, with 16 bit cd now very very good, it's difficult to imagine it getting much better, but we shall see. A very good friend has recently placed his order for a T+A PDP3000HV, which we may compare to my MBL/Concert Fidelity/Esoteric combination with the Symetrica power supply feeding them. (Same friend will also have a power supply soon, as it is essential for better sonics). Other friends have like me, concluded that non physical media is inferior to physical; and this goes all the way up to DCS Vivaldi full stack.

Long live the humble silver disc!

Rgds, Paul.

IMHO there is a greater variance among performances and recording quality than between Redbook versus other formats. I have an AncientAudio LektorPrime CDP.

CD + Tidal streaming, both very gratifying in my system. 

In both of my systems, I've been very happy with my Sonic Frontiers SFT-1 Transports (modified) and my Yamamoto DA converters YDA-01(slightly modified).
I heard such improvement with that combo I deceided to have them in both systems.

Several 1000 CD ripped to a hardrive using iTunes about 10 years ago. Some HD tracks hi resolution material. More recently Tidal. I like the way I can sync my iPhone and get a compressed lossy version of my complete catalog for the car.

I discovered Benchmark DAC1 about the same time and I now own a DAC 2 also and a DAC 3 is being shipped to me right now.

To add to what Georgehifi said: About 15 years ago R2R DACs were indeed better sounding than early Delta Sigma DACs. However early Delta Sigma issues (glare) have been resolved and their performance currently far exceeds R2R.

I would add that I use a Mac Mini and optical to the DAC. I use a digital volume setting of 1 and an app "BitPerfect" to ensure iTunes original file sample rate is preserved all the way to the DAC (Bitperfect controls the Mac audio output and ensures it changes on the fly to match the original file sample rate). I believe it is best to let the DAC handle the original bitperfect file and do all conversion (upsampling) to analog.

For Tidal, I use the Tidal app and set it to highest quality and also to control audio output sample rate to match the original Tidal source file sample rate.