Why are so many people spending so much money to build “perfect” streaming system?

i am also referring to recording decades old, back in the analog days...they sound so much better now either as digital playback or streamed. i would love to read a history of the last four decades of the parallel milestones in both the recording and playback chain. make for a good article for the big magazines and start from the 70’s. what where the breakthrough players and the pioneers behind them. step by step. chip design, implementation, PSU, development of architecture and approaches. a complete holistic survey of the last 50 years of digitals evolution.

Spotify family lo res for research and on the move and then if I love something I get on CD or vinyl (both comparable in quality on my system luckily)

Has cut down purchases for sure ... Some stuff I listen to on training runs ornturbo I would never buy HaHa it's a pace speed thing

Here's a newbie question. Do most streamers allow you to listen to a specific radio station via url? 

Yes on Ifi zs.  A few hundreds of choices. Most plays up to 320kbps mp3 / AAC.  A handful of them play flac but you do not expect the same quality of streaming.  Played with some lags so some people actually think the radio station feature is not working. 

SNS hit it on the nose.... if it weren't for streaming many great artists could and would be missed if you hadn't subscribed to a streaming service. I've spent a lot of money on cds and vinyl and if it hadn't been for streaming, I would never know about many great singers. We spend money on streaming components to make it sound good once we realized what good artist are now available to listen too. That is the short and long of it.