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The case for CD over streaming, by Cyrus

tiggers said:
In 1990 I heard the same arguments about vinyl.

At the end of the day there are always going to be people who want to own physical media, it will be a small minority, but it will always be there. SDE is a site fully focused on box set/limited edition physical media and is doing very nicely. There is a market.

Yes streaming is great until, like me in lockdown 1, you lose your broadband connection for 12 days. I think a happy mix of old and new is fine. I have vinyl, CDs and stream occasionally when working, but I prefer CD overall.
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That’s a fair point about the dependency on broadband, but were that to happen to me I would still have all the rips of the CDs I have bought, and the downloads I have bought, to keep me going. And Qobuz lets you have a few thousand tracks in a local cache for offline listening, so I could easily last 12 days! And what better time than lockdown to get round to ripping your cd collection!
 
Meetings of the local now Zoom based record club have revealed that albums are sometimes revised for streaming services with additional tracks added or different mixes to the original release. I know this sometimes happens with physical media too, but probably less often and it seems more transparent when it does.

So when we meet to discuss the album of the week we're sometimes not all talking about the same experience.

I do like the idea of an album being specific whilst also acccepting that there are different specific iterations of albums for good reasons. It seems that streaming is sometimes a bit haphazard about this and in a sense challenges the primacy of the album as an entity. One record club member feels streaming is more democratic but others that it concentrates power and denies creators a voice.

In any case CDs are so cheap in charity shops nowadays that I am tempted to buy a fair few (alongside some new ones and LPs) and load them onto my laptop for streaming, then often donate them back again thus delaying their trip to landfill.

As for SQ I often prefer streaming to the CDs, but certain recordings (often from the analogue age) sound best of all on vinyl.
 
Living in an area with flaky internet access. I still play and buy cds. More so since I bought a streamer last year. I now find that I listen to more new and varied music via the streamer and buy on cd anything that I find exciting. I no longer end up with a pile of poor cds in my collection, only music that I’m entirely happy with.
 
Tony L said:
b) If you care in the slightest about the artist and their ability to go on creating then buy the physical media,
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Alternatively, buy downloads from sites like Bandcamp. 90% (I believe) goes to the artist (or the label), except on free Fridays when it's 100% It also enables artists with no resources to get their music heard. Today I bought "Music from Saharan WhatsApp 10", recorded on cellphones, and transmitted by WhatsApp to the label and offered as pay what you want.
I also buy CDs where possible (and not overpriced) and rip them.
 
Why does streaming has to exclude CD listening? Why do I need to listen music everywhere and anytime? I do not get this streaming vs cd fight. Why are vinyl records and turntables spared by streaming obsessed?
 
Streaming does nothing for me.
I use Spotify Premium in my car or for casual listening, when I have guests for a meal for instance. I also make compilation CDs.
I want something that I can handle, and which makes me purr.
CDs and records are still where hi-fi’s at for me. I guess that tells my age...
 
chartz said:
Streaming does nothing for me.
I use Spotify Premium in my car or for casual listening, when I have guests for a meal for instance. I also make compilation CDs.
I want something that I can handle, and which makes me purr.
CDs and records are still where hi-fi’s at for me. I guess that tells my age...
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I love handling vinyl and CDs but streaming came of age some time ago and is equally valid IMO. With cd quality streaming the gap is closed and now we have choice.Applications like Roon add a great deal to the experience. Vinyl and cds have survived whilst cassettes, MDs etc have fallen away, though I still occasionally listen to cassettes. Streaming is here to stay and music is where it’s at.
 
i can think of a fair few people, all a few generations younger than I where this is not a topic worth discussing. All their music met by streaming, either from a streaming service or internet radio. It sounds very much like a CD player maker trying to hang on to its reducing customer base to me.
 
50 million tracks + your CD / file collection vs just your CD collection. For me it’s a no-brainer!

Unless you have a special attachment to handling shiny plastic discs, the only argument left for CD players is sound quality.

I once compared a 5K server/streamer with a 1.5K CD player in the course of a speaker demo in the context of choosing the highest quality source for the demo. I have no idea which streaming service was used, how the network was set up etc. So not a controlled test, but the CD player was so much better it was embarrassing.

So yes, if you replaced a CD player with a one box server/streamer from a hi-fi company at the roughly the same price point, it would not surprise me if the CD player sounded better.

That said, CDs and streaming can be effectively equal with some knowledge and careful set up. But not everyone wants to go down that rabbit hole or drop a large amount of cash on a hifi company streamer which will be obsolete in a relatively short time.
 
With streaming I can try out music I probably wouldn't buy. If you are only going to listen to something once it doesn't pay to buy. CDs also take up space I would struggle find.
 
There is also an element of convenience. I don’t necessarily want to listen to a whole album or album side. I don’t mind moving the needle but doing it regularly can make the ritual a little tedious. I can make a playlist where the tracks I don’t want to hear are edited out. There are few albums that I want to hear right through. I can do the same with cd. And without compromising sound quality.
 
cctaylor said:
With streaming I can try out music I probably wouldn't buy. If you are only going to listen to something once it doesn't pay to buy. CDs also take up space I would struggle find.
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Agreed, that's why I have kept Spotify premium. I must admit the CDs are taking up a lot of space, but not as much as my vinyl!
 
chartz said:
CDs and records are still where hi-fi’s at for me. I guess that tells my age...
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Not unless you are considerably older than me. I'm 72.

dudywoxer said:
i can think of a fair few people, all a few generations younger than I where this is not a topic worth discussing. All their music met by streaming, either from a streaming service or internet radio.
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Heckyman said:
50 million tracks + your CD / file collection vs just your CD collection. For me it’s a no-brainer!
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To both of these points; it's not your CD collection vs 50 million tracks, it's what is available to you. Streaming services have big gaps in their catalogues, each one being different. I have over 30 albums by a few artists (sad, I know) where the streamers have a fraction of that. So they control your musical choices. No use searching their back catalogues; it's not there! I have noticed Qobuz has more world music, for example, than some others.
Young (and some older, like me) people don't KNOW what their musical needs are yet. It develops over time, or I would hope so, and having exposure to music controlled by corporations with their own financial and personal agendas (who owns Tidal, eh?) is something I hoped the internet and cheap digital recording would free us from. Not if we let streaming companies simply take the place of record companies, and continue corporate domination of our choices.
There is a huge amount of new and strange music out there, so why limit yourself to a (admittedly huge, but still controlled) selection made by others? Not for your benefit, but theirs.
I still remember (through a glass darkly) how our explosion of choices and alternatives of, well almost everything, in the 60s was subsumed by the corporate behemoth into marketable fashions in the 70s, and particularly in music, requiring punk to rage against it yet again.
Cheap and easy music is what sells, and corporations have no real interest in what the consumer (a horrid term) needs, just what what can be sold to them. Nor do they really care about the musicians; how much do they pay them? It's all Hollywood, give 'em more of what they consumed last time, it makes money.
And yes, I have deliberately chosen those parts of the posts.
 
My argument for 'streaming' is diversity. How on earth could I have ever stumbled on gems like these when music was only available via the record companies:


Recorded at home with SQ better than at least 90% of all record label Jazz of today, plus no 'mastering' to worry about. WYSIWYG.

As has been noted above, we don't need new CD's, there are billions out there to collect, and they are CHEAP.
 
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