A sign of the times?

jolymill

to my ears, downloads/files have an artificial smear that a CD/SACD disc does not.  A physical disc can sound warmer, yes.  Happy Listening!

I think this is highly amusing, obviously the reference being say 30 years ago it would have been vinyl vs CD with vinyl being warmer.

A sign of the times indeed Where it can be " claimed"a CD sounds warmer than downloads.

Very funny but likely quite true in some circumstances.

It just show how the paradigm has shifted. 

What's a CD?

All laughter aside it could be that there is something to this in some circumstances as uberwaltz and jafant point out. I'm sure most of us here are aware of the audible differences between CD players so it stands to reason that a disc played on a good CD player could easily sound different (warmer perhaps?) to an identical downloaded file played on a computer or inferior DAC.

In my own case I use a SACD transport and external DAC with digital downloads being played via the same DAC and I can detect no difference given identical bit/sample rates.