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Vote Your Ranking -If you have an opinion on this digital subject

There have been many statements made about this question here and on other forums stating differing opinions as which SQ is better :

 

1.-Red book CD

2.-Streamed High resolution files- i.e. Tidal/Qobuz

3.-Downloaded files purchased in Super Hi Res-Acoustic Sounds

4.-Red Book CDs ripped and stored for playback as files

 

Everyone may have an opinion on their preference

but is there any actual evidence of this? I suppose the only

way to produce evidence would be via blind testing and

survey results.

 

So please list in your preferred order the numbers

1,2,3,4  with the 1st being the best/ 4 the worst SQ 

 

Audiophiles may have an idea of their preference

but is there any actual evidence? I suppose the only

way to produce evidence would be via blind testing and

survey results. 

 

Does anyone have some hard facts as it relates to this query? 

 

Thank You.

 

chorus
reruam
19 posts
 

1..digital output direct from transport to DAC..way fewer boxes

3,4…

2 last but close..

ghdprentice
6,963 posts
 

The only controversy comes from what equipment you own and your experience level.

 

If you have the equipment: Streaming is now capable of sounding better than Red Book in any format with High Rez files and equal to high Rez files of the same resolution from other sources. 

 

stereo5's avatar
stereo5
6,384 posts
 

Since I don’t stream and I have an excellent SACD player, I’ll go with 1.

fuzztone's avatar
fuzztone
5,597 posts
 

The only determining factor is what they are playing on.

"Since I don’t..." is not an answer.

I don't purchase many files. BFD

What about ripped SACDs (DSD64)?  They are digital too.

 

erik_squires
16,052 posts
 

My 2 cents:

 

Over the last 15 years CD playback got remarkably better, coinciding with relatively inexpensive DAC's using new architectures around capacitor charging instead of resistors.  There's an AKM document which seems to talk to this.

Currently after a lot of fiddling I use Roon's upsampling to 96kHz and am happy enough to leave everything alone.

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