CD transport vs.streaming

When you stream music that's encoded using a lossless codec what goes to your DAC is identical to what comes from a CD. When you stream from a free streaming service there's a good chance that you're getting a compressed stream that has lower quality. I rip CDs to WAV format, which saves music in exactly the same format it has on the CD. And as far as I can tell it sounds the same when I play it.

@densely You must have been reading some posts from Georgehifi, he would constantly post about a few streams vs cd that measured slightly different then made generalizations about streaming compression. I want to see proof of mass compression of streams, otherwise only anecdotal evidence based on .000001% of recordings.

I think that CD’s and Streaming can sound equally good but in both cases it depends on the master used on both the CD and the copy the streaming service is using and it also depends on the electronics being used for each media source.

As far as CD’s go in many cases I prefer my old original AAD CD’s sourced and mastered from the original analog tapes but that is not 100%.

I run my Bluesound Node 2i through the DAC in my Moon 260D CD player and with balanced cables to my preamplifier. If the original source on both the CD and streamed file are good they will sound equally fantastic.

There was a reason CD was decided to be sampled at 44.1kHz. Many many many experiments were done and it was observed that 99.9% of the people could not hear any difference above that sampling rate (the other 0.1% descended from dogs).

Raising the sampling frequency will only push up the nasties from the filters to higher frequencies. So, up sampling does not improve the sound, it simply pushes up the filter artifacts to higher frequencies, hence giving the impression that the sound is ’cleaner’.

However, if very good designed and cleaner filters (more expensive to implement), are used, the 44.1 khz will sound almost exactly as good as your 23456234098634256 Mhz upsampled $34,000,000 music gear :-)

That is why most of the time, as well as is the case with you, you will not notice that much improvement with much higher up sampled music.

Buying a good quality CD player with a very good filter stage at its DAC will sound just as good.

Here is a good educational video:

rvpiano

another reason I posted my ’better player quest’ is because many people have gotten rid of or stopped using their CD players, stopped playing their actual CDs. Your subject implies re-discovery to people who stream. Even though I don’t stream, I had to re-discover my CDs. I suppose there is a category who have never actually owned/played CDs.

Like me, those people are not inclined to spend a heck of a lotta money to rediscover actual CD’s.

After spending 2 years exclusively LPs, I decided to try for a better sounding CD player. It can be done I found, now I don’t hesitate to enjoy my CDs as well as my LPs. To the point that I buy used LPs or used CDs now, expecting the CD to sound really good. Or not, content/engineering is always an issue.

So much technology is involved, either can sound superior, yet a few changes, the other could be superior, either ’preferred’ or ’better’.