What am I missing?

The use of “cd quality” is used to establish a benchmark. There are way too many formats to list here for music files. Some are terrible compared to cd and some are superior to cd. It all has to do with the bit rate and amount the information is compressed. The lower quality highly compressed uses less bandwidth. That was necessary a few years ago as the bandwidth coming into our homes could not achieve hi res files. CD’s imo are only falling out of favor from the advancement of quality dac’s. A cd player will never have an internal r2r balanced dac in it. Yes they are making transports only but with the quality of streaming who needs it unless as like I do I still have my over 2000 cd’s. I use an old blue Ray player feed into my Gustard R26 dac and they do sound very good.

1. RedBook CD

2. XRCD

3. SACD

4. Ripped version of each above saved in a NAS

5. Streamed version of #s 1,2,3

Put these in order of SQ 

"Mass market" standards rarely meet the expectations of audiophiles-- the bulk of consumer electronics sold are cheap, essentially disposable, can tie into a phone or computer and CD is certainly better than MP.3 

I think you have to put all this into context -- when the record business was booming based on physical media sales, the big labels had money to advance to unknown bands to develop. The labels took the risk on a lot of artists that never made it in the hope that one would grab the gold ring and make up for these outlays.

When Napster first opened the door to file sharing, everybody was "Yeah, I don't wanna pay for a whole album. I just want one track." (Assuming that they were willing to pay for even that much). I don't lay the demise of the old industry structure entirely on the advent of file sharing-- there was heavy reliance on legacy acts, less A &R and more follow the trend than ever, but artists who did sell got paid through advances, whether or not they fully earned them back. 

Now we are at a point where the majors got gutted, pretty much like the major motion picture companies- no more back lots, no more in house studios and performance spaces-- simply distribution arms. The gate keeper is Big Data. Music is more commoditized than ever. And it almost always migrates downward to the lowest common denominator. 

At the same time, we are still enjoying a hi-fi renaissance in our little corner of the universe- more vinyl, turntables, tonearms, cartridges, etc. than ever. But, think about all the threads here now devoted to streaming--its easy, convenient and can sound pretty good. You are paying more for the gear and services that will do that, but its a small investment compared to what you'd wind up spending on physical media. 

It's also a no-win for the artists. Touring is costly, ticket prices are hard to justify and unless a song catches and gets used in a tv show or commercial, very few songwriters make big money these days. The supporting musicians make very little. Composing for film or TV can still be lucrative. I feel for the artists, try to support them in various ways, but the reality is, music isn't the kind of high priority purchase that it might have been in the '70s when a good stereo was part of the lifestyle. "Good enough" is usually fine. 

2nd - 

As above, the Entertainment Industry (Film and Music) do not want the Consumer to own Physical media.  Beware.

Happy Listening!

Many good points brought forward in this thread. I’ve never had a vinyl collection worth talking about nor a setup that would make it worth listening to so I ditched it all 30+ years ago and went with CD format. Even today I feel Redbook format is the best- especially when ripped for solid state drive playback.

There have been a few threads in the past couple of days regarding music and its availability, accessibility, how we find it and prefer to use it. In reading these I see how many have/are embracing the world of streaming and although I understand all of the positive points I just can’t get past the sound quality- I don’t feel it’s there regardless of what format it claims to be.

As of today I stream music frequently with my low budget Sonos but that is only for auditioning new stuff to buy. As I don’t want to be totally closed minded to the fact that many others here are really happy with streaming I can’t help but think there must be some combination of equipment that would pull the streaming experience up to that of what I’m using now. But what is that $$ amount? 

Does it take $5K, $10K or is it more like $20K before you reach a level that equals or bests great Redbook playback? I’ve thought about it a lot but I’m just not sure. Maybe that question should become the topic of another thread.