Reply to post: Streaming is a young person's game

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

martinusher Silver badge

Streaming is a young person's game

>Streaming is a young person's game

I'm well over 50 (try 70) and I use digital music sources a lot. Its the only way to get half decent radio reception where I live (and while fiddling with a tuning knob and slide dial has its olde worlde charms you can't beat "Alexa, play <fill in the station name>" for convenience). (...and yes, we have the option to connect to real speakers via Bluetooth etc.). Playlist services like Pandora and Amazon are useful for background music, a radio substitute.

But.....

Once you start using hifi systems then the little details matter. You don't have to go stupid with oxygen free silver mains sockets, 'directional' data cables and the like but you do need a decent DAC with a proper clock source to recover the music. (No, you don't have to spend five figures on the thing -- even instrument quality ICs are quite cheap.) Lossy compression relies on perception trickery so even AAC will sound a bit off. You will be stuck with WAV or FLAC files; since media players tend to be fiddly to use ("playlists", "songs" and so on) you will often find it easier to just play the CD. (I do have the capability to play vinyl but it really isn't as good as the fanbois make it out; its just that a lot of pop music CDs are mastered at too high a level, they're too compressed so they sound awful on a decent system. Classical doesn't have that problem; the people who make classical records are for the most part people who listen to the product.)

(BTW -- I'm not going to go into valve vs.solid state. I've got one of each. They have their good and bad points.)

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