Why Do ~You~ Still Play CDs?

I do stream but I still like the tube sound of cd. Primaluna  and old carver sda 490t rebuilt by rowland, bat vk 5sd,shanling cdt100,but my favorite mcintosh mcd12000.it is a time and place in life of hard work paying off the journey of thrift stores to find  a cd and the mesolimbic system of the brain and chemicals it sends out.enjoy the music and life.stay healthy

The better my system gets, the better Redbook CDs sound... 

Having watch the development of the digital-sound market for 15+ years, I prefer the relative simplicity and SQ of CDs and LPs.  

Compared to streaming, CDs tend to have equal or better SQ, are less complicated, are more reliable, and have no monthly fee attached.

While not on par with high-SQ LPs, CDs can sound great (ex. Sam Sklair's Virgo on VTL).  Moreover, I find a Class-A CD player much preferable to the 4, 5, or 6 boxes that most HiFi streaming systems employ. 

Finally, each week multiple AG members initiate threads asking for help with their unreliable content-provider(s) or streaming gear - which keeps me playing CDs!

I still enjoy listening to CDs because I still collect them. However, I'm more selective in what I buy in vinyl or CD format for my music collection these days and focus on specific artists rather than genres or simply collecting a vast amount of physical music formats.

I have CDs that aren't available on streaming platforms and the SQ, as others have mentioned, tends to be better on CD than streaming. I enjoy looking at the album art and the value to $ ratio tends to be better than vinyl in many cases. There are also some artists that I listen to that have CD-only releases as well. 

I bought a mid-fi CD transport a few years ago after having been digital-only for years and rediscovered stuff in my CD collection that I hadn't listened to in ages. CDs I didn't really want anymore I re-ripped as FLAC for my digital library and I plan to trade those in at a local store for credit so I can buy more music.

It’s hard to compare cds and streaming because of variables on every set up. Let say I brought my SA10 to my friend house . Obviously his streamer is already matching his system, my player will need acclimation time to perform its best.The the price between the sa10 and the streaming set up. Because of this the argument will not end. On my end I heard good streaming set up as well cd players set up.Both set up are good if done right.

I have a friend who told me the same thing cd sounds better than streaming. I ask him why ? He said too much upsampling on the streaming because of that the music no longer sound natural. I don’t know if this true?

@jayctoy  That’s just bogus and your friend has no idea what he’s talking about.  If your streaming doesn’t sound as good as CDs it’s because there’s something in your streaming setup holding you back.  It’s well worth the effort to find out what that is and fix it.