Is Pretty Good Good Enough? Listening Habits In The World Of Streaming Services.


I'm a recent subscriber to Tidal and Amazon Unlimited.  The sound quality of the cd quality music is surprisingly good.  I find myself listening to more music because of it.

I've also found myself in a situation when I come across a very familiar recording that I find it missing some of the inner details of the recording that I'm very familiar with....overall, the recording is good, but I noticed the missing elements.  Though I found it not as good as it sounds on my cd player, it was good enough that I didn't stop the song and went and got my cd and played it.  In other words, I settled for pretty good.  Interestingly, as I moved up the chain in the world of audio, it was always in pursuit of better equipment to extract better sound from the recording.  I was always looking for better than 'good enough'.  Well, 'good enough' has gotten a lot better than it used to be...and much more convenient.

Sadly, my critical listening time with my cd player and turntable is a lot less these days because of the streaming services.  I've just started to fiddle around with burning wav files of my cd's to a hard drive to make copies of those recordings where nothing but the original file will do. 

How have your listening habits changed since the higher resolution services have arrived?

128x128mitch4t

When talking “critical listening”, any extra effort to seek the best source shouldn’t be an issue really.  If <critical then yeah stream to your heart’s content. When working I stream Pandora via WiFi and at times I even pause to listen to some pretty incredible sounding stuff.  When critical listening, I always reach for the CDs.

@bigtwin 

I get a lot of enjoyment from my stereo other than listening.  I love the look of it.  I love the beauty of P8 turntable.  I enjoy handling the cover of an LP, the artwork and liner notes. 

Honestly, I believe a lot of vinyl lovers are far more like you than they'd admit, with a large portion of their vinyl enjoyment being in the "care and feeding" of the vinyl experience. I've always considered it a chore myself, but to each their own. If you enjoy that part of the experience, then it's a bonus on top of the music.

I do miss the album covers and liner notes that disappeared (or minaturized into oblivion) with CDs. But I still have about a thousand I can dig out to look at if I get too nostalgic.  But it isn't the same as buying a new album and reading through it the first time as you listen to the new tunes.

I don't stream from hi-res services, but as @sj00884 described, I also stream from Pandora while working, or listen to ripped CDs, through headphones and laptop while working. Quality is fine for me since I'm concentrating on what I'm writing or reviewing. And I have found a great deal of music over the last decade that I otherwise wouldn't have, and now I own much of it on CD. I have to say that the whole concept of "critical listening" to *music* seems a bit bizarre.  I listen to enjoy the music, not to "critically evaluate" it. Those two concepts are mutually exclusive in my experience. YMMV of course.

I stream Qobuz and Tidal (I think hifi?) through the older PS Audio DAC with Bridge II and I find the sound quality to be excellent.  Way better than “good enough”.

If you enjoy streaming. Give yourself a Roon setup for christmas present. You can have both Tidal and Qobuz.