CD Player vs. music streaming

I have recently gotten rid of my Ayre CD player because I finally found a music server and DAC that sound better IMO. I’ve gone with the dcs Bartók, along with Roon on a Roon Nucleus. 
The ripped CDs all sound better (again, to my ear) than they did on the Ayre CD player, plus convenience factor is great. I use Qobuz as a streaming service because to my ear their hi-res FLAC files sound distinctly better than the Tidal MQA files - not quite as good as the ripped CDs, but quite good enough. 

I’m really happy with the changeover, and the simplicity of one digital source and one analog source. 

When I had my SACD player and a Paradigm streamer (Tidal),  I would listen to both. When I got a Sony ES HDD player and ripped my collection to the drive,  I haven't listened to the CD player since.  

It has been proven over a decade ago that a cd will sound better played ripped from a hard drive than from a CD player. The most critical piece of the digital chain is the dac, and not all dac inputs are created equal.

Every music server you buy is a computer. The only difference a music server company will tell you is that it’s optimized for usb 2.0 playback whereas a normal pc/Mac doesn’t have that. Another gimmick trying to get usb to sound decent. There are dozens of other gimmicks/tweaks you can apply to usb to try to get it to sound decent.

If you like playing the silver discs, buy the best dac you can afford and use the i2s input on the dac if possible, coax if you don’t have a i2s input.
if starting from scratch, you can run Roon on a good performing server with 16 GB of ram and multiple cores and put this in a separate room never in the audio room. (I use a Mac either a Mac mini with 16G or an iMac with 24 G of ram, and neither of these computers ran over 20% of its processing power and just use Ethernet going out to the dac).
Get the best dac you can afford. I also use the PS Audio DS sr and DS jr dacs with their Ethernet connections. These dacs also provide i2s connections if your CD player has this output.
Keep it simple using the best gear.

Why complicate things by using a 3rd party music server by anyone? What happens if this 3rd party server crashes? How do you backup or more importantly restore your data when your disk fails? Do you know linux because that’s what most of these 3rd party music servers use (I used linux and Unix for decades in my work but this is not an OS for the computer/audiophile novice).
The music server people will tell you to use a nas which is fine but you will also need to back that up which requires another computer. I have swapped between different Mac computers depending on how I wanted to run things. I use an external drive for my data and my Roon backup and another external drive for my hourly backups. When I want to swap computers, I move the external disk with my data and Roon backup to the other Mac, point Roon to its backup, I restore Roon and a couple of minutes later, I’m back up and running. Try that with any 3rd party server

I found myself in a similar situation. I ended up buying an Audio Lab 6000 CDT Transport and use it with my Schiit Audio DAC.  I could not be happier. I almost spent more money on a CEC transport... so glad I did not do that!

Rbstehno: the reason to use a dedicated music server is because they offer significantly better sound quality than a PC or Mac. I used to run an optimized Mac mini - solid state hard drive, 16 GB ram - only running as a music server. I never used it for anything else.  The music server I bought smoked it - not even close.  This was true even after I converted the Mac’s USB output to SPDIF w/ a nice converter.  Further, I always had to update the Mac.  Updates to the servers/streamers I have are far less frequent. I have 3 different servers and/or streamers.  None have ever crashed. 

I would also say that I now believe the music server and/or streamer is actually more important than the DAC.  I experienced a bigger improvement in sound quality from this upgrade than from the DAC upgrade.  And, I upgraded from a decent streamer (Node 2) to a higher end streamer and again experienced a leap in sound quality.

Lastly, I would note that my better streamer has greatly improved the sound quality of Spotify premium.  I have subscriptions to Tidal and Qobuz.  Both are very good and sound better than Spotify.  But, I noticed a leap in sound quality from Spotify w/ the upgraded streamer.

Regarding the backup issues you note - fair points.  However, in my one system, I use that Mac Mini as my Roon core and file storage.  Guess what just failed.  Fortunately, the Mac is backed up. 

Perhaps the way to manage all this is to use streamers instead of servers - the difference being no onboard storage to lose.  Then, you’d keep the backup ease of your solution but have the improved sound quality and ease of use from the streamer and app.


My $.02
Best,