Streaming music comparisons and quality

I agree with Vhiner, the services aren't directly competitive, which you prefer depends on how you want to listen at any given moment and to some extent on what kind of music you listen to most.

I subscribe to Mog, Pandora One and eMusic and have used Spotify occasionally. Pandora is great for throwing unexpected but interesting new music at you and the algorithm works pretty well as long as there's a lot of similar music in their catalog. If you favor distinctive and difficult to classify musicians, however, the playlists can drive you crazy.

I love Anouar Brahem, for instance, but an Anouar Brahem channel on Pandora serves up a lot of insipid soft jazz and the more time you spend training it the more often it plays the same few performers over and over.

All those sources mentioned are great resources and, fortunately, they have different strengths. Even if you pay for subscriptions to all of them the volume of music instantly available makes them an incredible bargain.

Sfar,

I completely agree. I hope people realize what a bargain all of these services are. Sent through a high quality machine like my Perfect Wave DAC II, they all sound pretty sweet.

Sfar,

I completely agree. I hope people realize what a bargain all of these services are. Sent through a high quality machine like my Perfect Wave DAC II, they all sound pretty sweet.

Currently streaming music from HP desktop and Apple Time Capsule HD/router in a remote room of the house to a Zardoz server (hot rodded Apple Express from France) wired to my system in downstairs listening room. Use Apple Touch as my remote to select cd tracks from my music library on the Time Capsule. Being an older guy, I'm not up on computer technology. I'm assuming these services must be purchased or subscribed to. Are they something that I could stream to my system using my current hardware (have HP desktop in a remote room of the house)? I like all music genres, but lean toward the rock I grew up with in the 60s & 70s. To that point, I enjoy my Sirius rock channels while driving in my car.

Rockyboy...yes they are subscription services that allows one to pull up specific albums and listen to them completely without interruption. The $5 per month does have ads so I recommend splurging for the $10 per month service. It's basically like having access to a giant music database so it's a great way of checking out albums and artists before making purchases or listening to stuff that doesn't justify a purchase.