CD transport vs.streaming

@ghdprentice 

Thanks. Yes… physically owning a disk… paying and storing these is on the way out. I have 2,000 vinyl albums and 2,000 CDs… takes up space and if you don’t steam, confines you to listen and re-listen repeatedly to the same thing… but for the price of one CD per month, you have access to millions of tunes.

Agree. Sold all my vinyl and almost all my CDs (I have about 50 hard-to-find, remasters, steelboxes, etc. left). The sale paid for years of streaming. Got rid of the racks to hold them too. So much less clutter. And my streaming can be totally voice controlled. Try that with a CD. And those millions of songs I now have access to are portable on something I always carry with me - my phone. No ripping required.

@ghdprentice Way back then, in my vinyl days, they said CD’s were the future...

A factor I left out the other day: the quality of the codec that's used to convert from the data stored on a CD or in a file to the stream that travels over the network or through the data path from the CD transport to a DAC.

Listening to an album is a different experience from listening to a service.

Most likely you have spent time researching the Album, Genre or the Artist. You have followed a path. It’s a journey.

Most of the (new) music I listen to is not part of mainstream music services. And now some of the old music too (see Neil Young, et.al. :-)

A streaming service is mostly used to chose a compilation of tracks based on your mood, activity, or whatever. It’s more like radio used to be.

I buy most of my music from Bandcamp, that also supplies a good quality rip (occasionally up to 24/96).

I play local files and only sometimes CDs. There is already too much big brother snooping going on.

I'm a solo manufacturer, so if I may - try listening to an SACD with this setup: HDMI out of a universal player to the GeerFab Audio D.BOB, which extracts the DSD64 (and PCM up to 24/192) and sends it to an external DAC via the DoP over Coax/Toslink protocol. Legally. The SACD world has been waiting 20 years for this. More reliable than streaming. Is there even a way to stream DSD? Download, yes, but streaming?