Music through streamer vs CD/SACD


I wonder what method is used by the platforms to upload music to the cloud, I imagine something simple like a digital ripper or hard drive on a PC. For this reason, I consider it useless to rate the sound quality if you have high-end equipment. I think that listening to an SACD on a +$15k player to compare with a streamer of the same price range, there will be a noticeable difference. What do the experts here think?

avl1947

I have a high end CD player and a high end streamer. The sound quality of a red book CD is the same locally stored, from disk or from streaming. For high resolution albums, streaming sounds better. Qobuz has over half a million high resolution albums.

 

In general a in the fifteen to twenty K range they can be the same. But like everything in audio, you must make carful choices in equipment that is both compatible with your taste, is best in class and is compatible with the rest of your equipment. .

 

You can see my system under my UserID, my CD sound quality = streaming = vinyl. With the same material they sound the same. This is by design, I wanted a specific sound, so my CD player, DAC, Phonostage, and preamp are the same (Audio Research Reference level)… and I chose a phono cartridge and streamer to achieve the same sound.

 

If by platforms you mean the streaming services, no, they are not ripping cds or using pcs. I don’t know how the transfer is done but I assume files are sent by the record labels to the streaming services over the internet and stored on servers. Again I don’t know how they send out the streams to individuals, but I’m sure it involves a lot of sophisticated professional computer equipment. These services are not run out of someone’s basement.

Qobuz and Tidal have at least a million albums available, many hi-res. That would be a lot of ripping and hard drives.

Both can sound equally excellent.  To me the main difference is there’s obviously near unlimited music thru streaming and tons of hi-res recordings you can’t get by spinning a silver disc.

They should complement each other.  My DSD recordings from SACD are the best sounding in my collection but red book and streaming can also sound excellent.  Not all music is available on SACD and the future of the format isn’t bright 

If you’re comparing a CD player to a streamer driving an outboard DAC, then the difference may be largely attributed to the differences in DACs. If your cd player has digital inputs, i.e. USB, you can compare the sound more accurately and probably not hear much difference provided your streamer is on the same level as your player. I did this comparison just recently using Aurender N200 into the USB input of the Marantz SA-10. I compared both local files and streaming from Qobuz and Tidal. In some cases it was too close yo call. Generally though the hires streaming is on par with CDs.
If I had the N200/Bricasti M3 combo, then the sound is completely different from the configuration I described above. There’s no advantage of spinning CDs unless it’s a rare album not available on streaming. In that case just rip it to a nice SSD and you should be good. All about the quality of the components pretty much.