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?

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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.

I just added Qobuz to my BlueSound Node setup, along with Tidal, Amazon and Napster.  Taking Qobuz for a 1 month test run..I will decide between Tidal and Qobuz and keep only one of the two.

I won’t be getting Roon for a while, BlueSound has everything I need for now.

I have never streamed.  Not once. Vinyl is high end enough. I can’t imagine any streaming service being able to match the dynamics of vinyl.