The streaming revolution.

While I do utilize streaming, it is more for discovery and convenience than sound quality.  I have enjoyed the ability to listen to new music in the genre that I prefer at the time, this gives me new options to explore.  When I do find an artist or album that I like, I most likely buy the CD, then immediately rip it to my NAS.  Most of my listening time is directed to my own music on the NAS, while I keep all of my CD's in safe storage.  There's something about "owning" the music and providing a decent payback to the artist.

While I find being able to listen to almost any album that I want to hear on demand from Qobuz a massive advantage, I don’t listen to it as much as I might. That despite it being incredibly useful for trying out new music or exploring a favoured artist’s catelogue.

One reason for my failure to fully exploit Qobuz is that I have more than enough ripped CDs, etc. in the local library and albums on vinyl, so I don’t have time for listening to Qobuz. Up to now, my listening has been skewed towards vinyl as sound quality was so much better.

That has changed during an enforced rest from vinyl due to a faulty phono stage. I have found the sound of Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC with dBpoweramp Asset UPnP on my headless and fanless NUC and internal 4TB DSD so much more satisfying than Roon ROCK on the same hardware. A victory for the lighter processing of the UPnP approach. This way the Qobuz data skips the NUC and RAAT altogether. Asset can lighten the load on the streamer by unpacking FLAC files to WAV.

The downside of this is the loss of Roon integration of Qobuz with the local library. That integration and Roon Radio encouraged me to listen to Qobuz more. Without it, Qobuz lives in its own rarely visited ghetto.

The saving grace is that I can run Roon on the Windows server along side Asset UPnP. So I am now at a crossroads where I have to weigh up the relative merits of the sound quality and functionality of Asset UPnP and Roon. Unfortunately, jPlay for iOS isn’t a practical option for me. Sound quality is paramount, but the Roon and Qobuz combination is capable of expanding my musical horizons. 

My musical horizons are expanded by reading several magazines dedicated to my genre, the occasional book about music, and interacting on the internet with like minded individuals.  I then enjoy searching Qobuz and Apple for many of these recommendations.  The idea of a computer algorithm dictating what I might want to try next doesn’t really appeal.

@bipestuff tell me how that makes sense? Why would you buy a CD only to rip it and create a library of local files when you could EASILY just purchase the digital file and store it and for less money?

@fire_water 

It has been said pretty consistently that ripped CDs sound better than their streamed counterpart. I strongly doubt that that’s always true, though; as always, the devil is in the details.