Sound Quality of red book CDs vs.streaming

After a couple of years with Tidal's and/or Deezer's premium tiers I went back to Spotify for casual listening. Like others here I've found the streaming services just don't measure up to my own library of ripped/downloaded files. I'm perfectly satisfied with this, Spotify has a terrific catalog and is a great way to discover music I'm interested in owning. I also enjoy Pandora and some internet radio streams.

@audioengr .. for quite some time I've read your posts about using WAV vs. everything else and was an unbeliever. I recently moved to a UPnP/ethernet renderer based audio solution and now understand. FWIW I only tried WAV out of frustration with UPnP, which seemed to stumble a bit with my uncompressed flac files. A suggestion was made to try WAV instead of flac and not only did it behave better but also sounded better to my ears. (Not trying to start a war here guys .. just my very subjective and non-double blind listening experience. YMMV.)

I have been demonstrating the difference in formats at trade shows for years. My equipment has always been resolving enough to easily hear the differences, even USB. I even hear a difference in AIFF and uncompressed FLAC compared to .wav.

If you are using UPnP, then you should try Linn Kinsky and Minimserver with BubbleUPnP as proxy server, if you are not already using these.

Also, here are some killer tweaks to make Ethernet sound stellar:

1) AQVOX switch
2) 0.5m Wireworld Platinum Etherenet cable
3) EMO EN-70e isolator
4) 1.5-2.0m Wireworld Platinum Ethernet cable

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

rvpiano
any new gear headed your way in 2019?  Happy Listening!

jafant,

Thanks for asking.  Aside from the new Arcam streamer which Is a big improvement over Chromecast, I’m getting a new power cable for my DAC and new speaker cables from Morrow.
Interestingly, now that I have been extensively streaming, I have gone back to my original assessment that, on my system,  CDs sound better: more detail and life.

How about you?  Any new stuff?

Whoever said once you start streaming you’ll never go back, was right.
 I hardly play CDs or records anymore, unfortunately.