Streaming vs Physical Media

I have both an SACD/CD transport and Roon Nucleus Plus streaming server and I'd say, in terms of SQ it might be a "toss up".  They both are connected to the same DAC.  One thing that might be a plus for streaming is that, sometimes the CD I own is from an older master and my Qobuz version is more recently mastered and sounds just a bit better...probably being that it was mastered on newer, better equipment.

The hardest thing with streaming is the providence of the recording. I think streaming services purposely make it difficult to quickly find specific recordings. I find when I am comparing a specific recording (and volume levelling is off) there is no difference from CD and streaming.

Coming from the a background of information processing and managing huge programming and systems implementation projects, I assure you it is not purposefully hiding information about the recordings. It is a question of providing what the customer wants the most as fast as possible… and adding “nice to have” features later. This is a new highly competitive field… in ten or twenty years you will probably be able to find any version or mastering you want. If there is a service that will provide this data… and multiple versions first it is Qobuz.

bkeske wow great! 

Sorry GHD I can’t agree. Serving up this information would be rudimentary if they wanted to. If anything I have found a digression in easily available data. My understanding from research is that royalty rates are not the same for every track and hence there are business advantages to directing the consumer to specific versions not to mention that reducing the number of "popular" tracks allows vendors to reduce costs w.r.t to caching at various pops and the underlying bandwidth to support that further bringing down costs. Streaming is not really new at this point. Spotify, Google Music, Qoboz, Deezer are all over a decade old.