Is using streaming services worthy of an audiophile?

@danvignau 
Not sure just how you are transmitting your tidal signal to your system but I am getting 96 and 192 from their masters via dig coax to my Blusound vault 2 then output by single ended analog out to my McIntosh pre and it is noticeably better than Redbook CD playback.
Maybe if you were using say a smart tv to receive and using the tv analog outs to your system I could see how the sq might be poor.
I know this as it was how I first used to listen to Pandora...ok but not hifi for sure.

I still don't understand questions like 'is streaming services (namely Tidal) worthy for audiophiles'. Here's what I don't get. Streaming services like Tidal HiFi offer the same Redbook CD sample rate (44.1kHz, 16-bit) as the CDs you spin. If you believe your CD player sounds better or worse than Tidal HiFi, it's not because of the source of music.  It's usually due to the quality of your internal or external DAC chip set implementation and quality of the clock (oscillator) used to reduce jitter,

Tidal Redbook tracks and CD tracks sound the same to me when I compare using my Ayre CD player to Tidal Redbook tracks played via a Lumin S1.  The SQ difference tips in the direction of Tidal when playing MQA tracks. I already know the MQA haters will respond to this, but please only respond if you've ever listened to MQA tracks on Tidal via a decent Streamer/DAC and not a Bluesound Node 2 DAC.

If your definition of audiophile is vinyl, then I will concede that digital hasn't closed this gap, but the gap is narrowing and the convenience of digital must be considered. Pretty hard to listen to vinyl when you're driving or not in front of your 2-channel rig.

+1, @cycles2

I continue to be surprsed if people say that a particular digital system is almost as good as vinyl. Of course they continue to sound different, but only because vinyl is inferior. Apart from the ticks and the plops, vinyl suffers higher distortion, a non-flat frequency response, lower dynamic range, and lower channel separation.

Oh willemj... You are such a fundamentalist when it comes to what you believe to be true.

And you're reply will be: 'It's not a belief, my opinions are based on science. They're facts. Anything contrary is incorrect"