I Sold my CD Player!!! Streaming sounds so incredible!!!

@carlsbad2 not sure what your getting at but your statement that there should be no discernable difference between local ripped files and streamed is incorrect.

When I listen to a CD at WAV resolution it’s anywhere from 500 to 800 megabytes of data, if you stream the same album it is going through lots of compression algorithms and you are downloading maybe 50 to 80 megabytes.

My local source file is traveling from the SSD hard drive in my Aurender a few inches to the USB output then to my DAC, when you stream a album it is going from a server farm somewhere in the world through thousands of miles of fiber and copper lines through multiple computers and devices in the chain of your ISP, then to your modem, then to your router, then another run of patch cord coppper cable and heavily compressed and decompressed many times along the way.

Proclaiming that they should have no discernable difference doesn’t make it so, it’s very very obvious by using the ear test that uncompressed local files are superior to Qobuz streamed music, and I will admit Qobuz sounds pretty good but not even close to local files on the HDD.

I recommend you get a streamer with onboard hard drive and hear for yourself , I love my Aurender but there are others that have onboard storage.

PS - My Aurender is hard wired, Aurender doesn’t even have Wi-Fi you can only hard wire it and I use a high quality shielded Cat7 patch cord to go to the double isolated LAN port on the Aurender. I do plan to get a audiophile network switch at some point and maybe try a audiophile expensive patch cord, but I haven’t spent the money on that just yet.

Last week I tried to find Sviatislav Richter RCA recording of Bach Well Tempered Clavier Books I and II on my streamer.

Roon finds 2 versions on both Tidal and Qobuz in about a second.
Obviously this doesn’t work for some obscure recordings that are not available on streaming services.

Since using Roon, I’m buying and playing more vinyl than ever. Although 75% of my listening is streaming simply for convenience.

Suppose you want to compare his phrasing at a particular point such as 9 min 48 seconds on one vs 9 min 30 seconds on another.  Nothing but your physical media will let you do this
 

Actually you can do this with streaming quicker than you load a CD.

@fpomposo Sounds like you don't believe in FLAC.  I've never used an Aurender and I hope they don't have conversion problems making FLAC back into WAV. 

I upgraded my Innuos with onboard drive and a nice ripper to a grimm with onboard drive.  I don't use the drive much since it offers no audio benefits.  

Sounds like you really believe your WAVs are superior so that is what you are hearing. 

Enjoy the music.

Jerry

@carlsbad it's not that I don't believe in flac or aac, I have half my music collection ripped in aac because many years ago I need to save disc space, so I have heard lots and lots of "lossless" audio, and I have  extensively compared albums in aac vs WAV and WAV sounds superior, again it's a drastic difference.

The entire point of flac and aac was saving space back in the day, but now there is no point, I have maybe 800 CDs ripped and it's under 1 TB, my Aurender has a 2 TB SSD hard drive in it, my computers all have 2 TB SSD, my entire library is backed up to Dropbox which I have a 6 TB limit. I have no use or need to try and save disc space by using "lossless" compression formats that actually sound much worse than just doing bit for bit copies of the original CD without ditching half the bits using flac or aac.