CD or Streaming... am I missing out?

mglik

Nice system. Your Theta is an excellent transport. I have been thinking about adding one to my collection. Is your the basic or blu-ray upgrade?

Happy Listening!

accuphaseyyz

The DP-570 is sweet. Is this spinner your 1st Accuphase?

Happy Listening!

My okay Denon streamer was no longer supported by the company. It then became a FM tuner with wired iPhone/iPad capability. That being said, as long as I am using my iPhone via the firewire connection to the streamer, even a compressed 320 kbps streaming source will give CD's a run for the money.  Really well executed, non remastered CD's (Diana Krull, Mark Knopfler, Gomez and others) generally blow streaming away. I do have some grey market FLAC downloads that are amazing.

Streaming vs CDs is about convenience.  Not having to change a CD, being able to call up a wide variety of tracks with a few swipes of a tablet, and not having to store physical media.  Sound quality for streaming vs CD is essentially a non factor.  They both send 1s and 0s to a DAC.  Which sounds better depends more on the specific CDP or streamer under consideration 

It my system CD sounds better.  It's a tie when comparing CD's to CD's ripped on the hard drive of my music server with the CD Transport adding a little bloom around the midrange that locally stored rips playing on a music server don't have.  I think the server is probably more accurate.  Now for streaming the quality comes close to that of CD but where steaming blows the CD out of the water is the user experience.  I can sit on my chair with my IPAD and put together a playlist of 20 songs off qobuz and my cd rips without ever getting up from the chair.  Plus I have discovered so much new music from streaming that I never would have heard by just buying CD's.  I think the best thing is to discover new music using streaming and then go out and buy the CD's you want and either play them on a transport or ripped to a music server.