Slappy here. Been a long time, have some audio source questions.

Hey Everybody. 

Long time no see, I think it has been close to 13 or 14 years since I was a very active contributing member. Cant get in my old account Slappy as i cant remember the password and the email tied to it has been long since deleted. Maybe some of you old school guys remember me. :)

Brief History.

Took quite a break from audio, but found myself back into it recently.I had a Denon 3805, Denon poa-2800 amp, and a pair of Jmlab Chorus speakers with a pair of Velodyne subwoofers. Lived with this system happily for a long time. 

Long story short, various parts of the system were failing and now I have all new(ish) equipment.

I have a Denon 4100w receiver, a Carver TFM-45 (omg this thing is immaculate), and a pair of Martin Logan Motion 40s with a pair of older Velodyne subs. Massive improvement all around! I love the ML's, and the Carver amp really brings these babies to life. However, sometimes music sill feels a bit flat, and I think that is because virtually all my listening these days is on Pandora. 

So lets to get to the question. 

So what are the cool kids doing these days for quality audio with the flexibility of Pandora? Sometimes listening to Pandora it still sounds a bit flat, and other times it sounds excellent. I am pretty familiar with IP and how packets work, UDP, TCP, layer 2, layer 3, etc. I get the impression that sometimes depending on the overall bandwidth available through the interwebs that I might be getting better packet delivery sometimes than others.  I fully believe it is possible to stream high quality, but I am not sure if anybody provides that. I am hesitant to start building up a large collection of optical medium as it is prone to scratching, costs extra money, and reduces the overall flexibility. I may end up getting a transport, but I was wondering if there have been any cool advances with digital media in the last 13 years.  

Any Advice?