A few points.
Your original post points out the reason there is such a vibrant market in streamers and other related hardware. From the very beginning the goal was to bring streaming up to the point of CD quality. There are a lot of factors that can affect the sound quality from streaming. People spend thousands of dollars on their streaming hardware to achieve better sound quality. CD player quality has plateaued at a very high level. Streaming is still catching up.
It is a fallacy that the files that the record companies give to the streaming services are more compressed than the original CDs. There are millions of songs on the major streaming services and it is physically and financially impossible for the record companies to remaster them for this purpose. They are too cheap and lazy to do this but the main question is why would they do it? They have nothing to gain from this exercise. The 30 year old 44.1/16 Santana file you hear on your CD is exactly the same as the 44.1/16 file on Tidal or Qobuz (MQA is a different story). This has been verified numerous times. If someone found that the original file had been corrupted by further compression it would be a major scandal that the streaming company couldn't live down.
The idea that Tidal or Qobuz would compress the files themselves is also ridiculous. Their whole business model is centered around offering CD quality through their premium streaming services.
I have burned several thousand CDs using dB Poweramp (FLAC, uncompressed) and I can tell you that in my system the ripped file sounds exactly like the CD played through the same DAC. I can also tell you that 320 bit files through Spotify sound exactly as you describe compared to the same CD title. They are two dimensional with less clarity and the difference is not subtle. I'm about to subscribe to Qobuz so I'll have an opportunity to compare its sound quality to the CD version.
My overall reaction to your experience at your son's place is that something is wrong. You shouldn't have heard such a dramatic difference. But pretty soon I'll see for myself.
Your original post points out the reason there is such a vibrant market in streamers and other related hardware. From the very beginning the goal was to bring streaming up to the point of CD quality. There are a lot of factors that can affect the sound quality from streaming. People spend thousands of dollars on their streaming hardware to achieve better sound quality. CD player quality has plateaued at a very high level. Streaming is still catching up.
It is a fallacy that the files that the record companies give to the streaming services are more compressed than the original CDs. There are millions of songs on the major streaming services and it is physically and financially impossible for the record companies to remaster them for this purpose. They are too cheap and lazy to do this but the main question is why would they do it? They have nothing to gain from this exercise. The 30 year old 44.1/16 Santana file you hear on your CD is exactly the same as the 44.1/16 file on Tidal or Qobuz (MQA is a different story). This has been verified numerous times. If someone found that the original file had been corrupted by further compression it would be a major scandal that the streaming company couldn't live down.
The idea that Tidal or Qobuz would compress the files themselves is also ridiculous. Their whole business model is centered around offering CD quality through their premium streaming services.
I have burned several thousand CDs using dB Poweramp (FLAC, uncompressed) and I can tell you that in my system the ripped file sounds exactly like the CD played through the same DAC. I can also tell you that 320 bit files through Spotify sound exactly as you describe compared to the same CD title. They are two dimensional with less clarity and the difference is not subtle. I'm about to subscribe to Qobuz so I'll have an opportunity to compare its sound quality to the CD version.
My overall reaction to your experience at your son's place is that something is wrong. You shouldn't have heard such a dramatic difference. But pretty soon I'll see for myself.