CD or Streaming... am I missing out?

I love my Tidal, but also really love listening to my physical CDs and SACDs.

-Tidal, Spotify, Qobuz, are not comprehensive catalogues. I have plenty of physical discs that just aren’t on them. Every time we undergo a format conversion, it’s never all transcribed. (Famously, De La Soul, is not on streaming... these kids are missing out on history!)

-Lots of artists have ’special edition’ albums on streaming services. They just include another hour of unreleased B-sides and mixes. It’s to run up their score and make a few extra cents if you just leave it playing in the background. It’s almost like spam, or those recipe articles with Dickensian intros for SEO. I find it disingenuous.

-Likewise, A helpful thing with streaming was to turn auto-play, or repeat, off. I want silence when my albums are done, give the mind some time to digest.

-If I’m winding down at night, there’s a psychological merit to listening to something that has zero connection to the internet. Or if I’m coding, I want the music playing to come from a place that’s separate from the machine I’m working on. Having a disc play though is just one less distraction.

Also noteworthy, my CDP (Denon DCD S10) has a digital input, so I'm listening to all sources through the same converter. SACD is converted to PCM 88.2khz before being piped in (fight me) and MQA is either 88.2khz or 96khz. Rather than sweat every iota of performance from each medium and have a jumble of boxes, my goal was to reduce the differences between the sources and simplify my connections. And I really just love the look of my S10 set.

Local files sound better to me than streaming, but streaming can sound enjoyable. The real benefit of streaming is the ability to switch music really easily and to have 100s of thousands of music tracks accessible whenever you want them. It's been a huge change in how I discover new music.

I will always be oriented toward listening, my precious hours, to the best SQ I can muster. However, it seems very attractive to check out something like Pandora and how when selecting a favorite artist they mix in related content from others. Think I will spend some daily time listening to Pandora through the app on my smart TV. A good idea to discover new artists and music. Have that as a handy guide to buy new CDs or LPs.

Think I will spend some daily time listening to Pandora through the app on my smart TV. A good idea to discover new artists and music. Have that as a handy guide to buy new CDs or LPs.

Good way to look at it, use the internet services as a sampler library, then look for the "least compressed" version CD/LP of it using the "dynamic range data website" http://dr.loudness-war.info/ (usually the earliest/first one)
Get the label/cat no. buy used one for a couple of dollars on ebay, like I do.

Cheers George

+1 to what @georgehifi says.

Streaming can sound quite enjoyable, it's just not quite as good as playing back local files and definitely not as good as vinyl. However, I find that in this year of COVID and working from home that I'm streaming most of the time, because it allows me to listen to music while doing other things more easily.

See if you like the idea of listening through Pandora. Just know that if you like the idea of streaming, you can get FAR better sound quality via Qobuz. Even Spotify Premium sounds pretty decent. (Amazon HiFi & Tidal do not).