@chorus
A simple ranking is meaningless without a lot of caveats. For example, what CD transport player and what tech is employed ot make it sound good? If ripped and played from a computer, what is done to isolate THAT, and what is the path? You need ot get down to engineering. Sorry, reality.
Let's start with the basics. The bits don;t actually get affected at all. Bits really are bits. What we need to understand is that there are many more things at play both in the playback and in the path from the CD/file to the DAC.
Rubber meets the road at the DAC. What comes before may impact it, but is otherwise irrelevant. At the DAC (deep inside, not the audio component with afancy plate)you must have:
- The correct bits. This is easy
- Surprisingly perfect timing (this is much harder, and is ANALOG)
- zero or tiny noise on the ground to mess things up.
Interested folks might want to read this blog on the analog-ish-ness of the input signal to the DAC.
here
What may surprise you is that the signal is handled very differently depending ont the interface. SPDIF transmits timing. So if the CD transport's timing is so-so, the signal is so-so. USB on the other hand, just send the bits to a buffer and the DAC fixes everything. If you send god-perfectly-timed signal to the USB generating computer, it throws that timing away and regenerates it. Think about that.
This means that, for good DACs, USB ought to be preferred. It also means that there cannot be timing (or bot) differences between a ripped and FLAC'd track and the same from a CD.
In case you think i'm a bit head that does not listed, far from it. I listed to every single one of these and immediately found ripped FLAC from my macbook played through bitperfect to a good DAC was consistently a little better than from a CD player SPDIF out.
But USB is full of pitfalls. Most computers are SUPER noisy and transmit noise on the USB ground. They also have switching power supplies and their mere presence messes up the rest of your stuff, a little.
So you have to set everything up right. Isolate the USB interface or power it from a quiet linear PS. Put the whole computer or bridge on a LPS. Use a DAC with good jitter specs.
I run my server (Roon) remotely on a dedicated server. I designed and built a bog LPS for it (do you realize what a server draws at startup!!!!! holy sh~t!). I fling that to a roon bridge running on a Rpi with its own dedicated LPS. The USB input of my DACs all are isolated. One has my own board that has its own power supply and transformer isolation. It sounds f-ing wonderful, and my DACs are not THAT expensive (<$1000 plus a bunch of my own tweeks). I should get a better DAC but will wait until my own design exists.
I prefer Tidal and Qobuz. I doubt they actually sound any different than the4 CDs or ripped CDs, but they have a killer value: all the newly remastered albums - many of which leave the originals in the dust (hey the artists think so too, they did the work). I find that MQA is in fact better but its pretty darn small compared to a great red book CD. My absolute references, BTW remain red book, not because 16 bit is better than 24 -unpossible! its because they just happen to be great recordings lovingly mastered to digital. Listen to some of the Verve and Blue Note stuff done on 3 channel tubed master tape machines in the 60s and early 70s, or the Mercuries......
As to super high res streaming - i don't have many. While i think that24 bits is very useful in the studio, i dont honestly think that is where issues fall. If LPs can sound insanely good with ~ 70 db CDs ought to be able to scrape by with 96. (2^16 = ~65,500:1 = ~96 dB)
I hope this helps.
