Streaming vs Physical Media

@deadhead1000

Personally, I just can’t do that. Perhaps my age, and the ‘need’ to have physical media. Dunno.

As example, I have the Jerry Garcia Band live recording from 1990, recorded at Club Front.

I have it on my original double cassette I bought back then (still have it, and a Nakamichi tape deck), have it on CD, and also a rip of the CD on my server, also on Tidal if I want it there….and just bought the 4 1/2 LP box set that was recently released.

If I want to listen to it, I grab the vinyl first, no doubt about it. Then, maybe the CD, Or even the cassette which sounds great still. The only time I stream it is if I’m feeling extremely lazy, or listening on my bedroom system without a TT.. The vinyl is bar none the best choice SQ-wise.

That said, yea, I listen to all formats, and all are important to sound good to me regardless.

My two bits....

I definitely get better SQ from my CDT, but I own maybe 400 CDs. Streaming Tidal gives me millions of choices, so I spend far more time listening to Tidal.

Term "Streaming" used to be dedicated to music you don't own.
I use computer as server for the the music playback.  IMHO it can sound better than CD/Transport.  Transports operate in real time being able to read particular sector only once and in case of failure have to derive missing data from the error correction or to interpolate. Cheap computer drive ripping CD can read the same sector hundreds of times util proper checksum is obtained and this can also be verified by the checksum of whole CD.  I transfer this bit-perfect data over wi-fi, making anything on computer side (speed, amount of RAM, playback program) irrelevant, since only 100% bit perfect data gets to the other side of WiFi bridge. Up to this point it is only bit-perfect data (no timing involved).  What happens next, how this data is delivered to DAC decides upon sound quality.  It can be better or it can be worse than CD/Transport, but it is cheaper and more convenient.   I still have physical CDs because I like tangible media and because it is required by RIAA copyright rules. The fact that I can easily make multiple backups gives me sense of security and longevity of my music.

As for streaming services like Tidal - I tend to be old fashioned, but who knows - using server also sounded foreign to me at first.

Similar set up to some here Audiolab CDT 6000, Denafrips Ares 2, onto Vincent Hybrid pre / power to Audio Physic Sitara 25's. Recent change to Lindemann Limetree after much experimentation with Lumin, Bluesound and Aurender leaves me unable to say whether stream or CD consistently sounds better. However if pushed I'd say CD by an absolute fraction. For everything else however streaming is the way to go. 

A CD player IS a streamer. It streams 16 bit data to a DAC. It reads this data from an optical disc. The difference is in the encoding. Since lossless streams are available there is no difference anymore.