I buy and try new equipment with my home system whenever possible. I listen to Who’s Next on CD and a Best Sounding Songs playlist I created on Qobuz. At dealers I stream on Qobuz.
What source do you use to demo equipment?
Hello. After decades of enjoying my home audio system, I find myself beginning to look for my final end-all dedicated music system. So I am beginning to look at speakers, amps and source components.
The question is: with all of the new streaming services and hardware, when you go into an audio salon, what do you listen to as your baseline music and via what format? I used to take a few CDs along, which were familiar to test the musicality of equipment. With all of the streaming and source hardware variables, what do you use? I had an experience recently where I had a salon queue up a familiar song via their streamer and it sounded horrible. It lacked any dynamics compared to what I was familiar with. I went home and listened to it on my streamer and the same thing. It sounded terrible compared to the CD version.
So how do you get the consistency of sound for listening tests? What sources do you listen to when testing?
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@richardbrand “…It is astounding that the very dealers who decried the quality of digital sound now routinely stream (in digital) when demonstrating downstream components, even when these rival luxury cars in price.” True. But in all fairness the advances in streaming in the last ten years has been at break neck speeds in comparison to typical evolution or revolutions in high end audio. |
My understanding is that these advances have got streaming roughly to where classical CDs were 40 years ago! Hopefully in another 10 years, streaming will have got to where classical SACDs were 25 years ago. I am not conflating classical with multi-track pop-rock where digital mixing was problematic and there is no reference against which sound quality can be judged.
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- 33 posts total