The Rapid Rise (& Fall) of the CD

I’ve gone back to CD’s because, to me, the quality is clearly better than streaming from Tidal the exact CD quality track hardwired etc to the same DAC. I enjoy not having a computer, phone, tablet, etc when I want to listen to music as my whole day is spent in front of a screen. A/B testing on my McIntosh MCT500 vs my computer, both hardwired into the McIntosh DA2 btw.

I have wondered whether errors in the music while being transported over the internet/server/etc just create more issues than a simple CD transport to the DAC. 

"I have wondered whether errors in the music while being transported over the internet/server/etc just create more issues than a simple CD transport to the DAC. "

The answer is no. The interent simply wouldn’t work at all if data were not transmitted accurately.

One thing that can occur is line noise getting into the connection to dac from streamer and causing jitter, however that is not a practical issue even anymore with modern DACs and streamers that are designed to deal with that effectively, ie are jitter resistant.

CD or streaming might sound better case by case.  The devil is in the details.

The Stereophile thread is more sophisticated on this topic. Thanks for the link.

BTW I have multiple streamers in several rooms of the house and have used wi-fi (wireless LAN connections) exclusively since I started streaming in place of CDs 15 years ago (wow how time flies).  These days I stream mostly with Roon and that includes high resolution files  up to 192 khz.  As long as the wifi connections are all strong, this works like a charm, sounds greate, and isolates my hifi completely from network wiring and any noise/jitter issues that might pop up there.

There are many independent, off label, small label, and self release artists out there releasing on file sharing platforms, but also media. Cassettes and CD's, because of the economies of production will be around for awhile yet. Some artists I follow only release physical media on cassette and CDr. Many also sell/publish digital files. Think R. Stevie Moore and his subscription cassettes, which blazed a trail still much followed, The Corporate Music Business will be just fine (for a time) without selling physical media, if that's how they want to market their commodity.