If Qobuz needs to pay a little extra bandwidth to stream lossless Hi-Res vs Tidal with lossy MQA, in my opinion that is minimum. A significant carbon footprint is generated by running those data centres 24/7 for streaming music rather than you focusing on bandwidth alone.
Dude, you are off the track…
Ha ha! Ok mate, you need this more than me.
Think this is one for the bbc more ot less team
What about shipping to stores, heating and lighting of stores. Impact of journey to purchase etc.
Data seems a little selective.
I seem to remember a similar article when dab radio was introduced and how we all needed to return to a.m. transistor radios.
Did we cover banning speakers and only using headphones, to reduce power usage?
Holding your breathe? Seriously, this seems kind of random to me and arguments could be made about anything starting with fire and the wheel. I am pretty sure you could stop all streaming of music and in 10 years the number of data centers will still be substantially greater than now processing and distributing bits for purposes I cannot now imagine.
Possibly but my friend who works for Central Grid feels there is net benefit to renewables. Also, you ignore storage technology which is arriving.
I have a battery and water heating system which ‘store’ my excess energy.
Getting dragged a bit off topic I guess.
There are easy solutions. Wyred4Sound just released their new DAC that eliminates much of the concern:
Is that one or two button mouse?
Surprised no one has pointed out that the article is talking about internet streaming. Despite what most people believe, the internet is not an infinite resource. It relies heavily on what’s called Software Delivery Networks. These networks consist of caching servers in multiple data centers, and even multiple ISP’s. However in my case, having the system on 24/7 which consists of switches, routers,servers, and DSP’s uses far more energy than a CD Player and Amplifier turned on only when needed. Even then though, local streaming is far more efficient than internet streaming as I imagine some of the music I listen to is only listened to by 5 people globally at any given moment. 100’s of servers to serve 5 or 1 to serve 1. Yes I know the same servers serve numerous customers at the same time despite what they are listening to.
This post reminded me of some of the measures that are being tried to reduce the cost and impact of data centers. My favorite is Microsoft’s project Natick.
[quote=“James_I, post:11, topic:62788, full:true”]
Does this include the costs of manufacturing CDs or vinyl? The gasoline consumed to distribute the physical media?[/quote]
This was my first thought also.
I would be genuinely interested in a more considered comparison which looks at the real environmental impact of both distribution methods, assuming the same playback system at the end.
First came the war on coal. Prepare for the war on streaming by the have-nots.
Orkney sounds like a case of penny wise - pound foolish to me. I guess they’ll build in some massive amount of redundancy to avoid the computer outage problem.
Why on earth don’t they build it on a platform which can be raised and lowered for maintenance? Surely it only has to be just under the water for cooling purposes, not sunk fathoms deep.
A few years ago (maybe 10 or 15 years ago), the calculation was made that 30% of energy used in Amerika went to the service of computing. I suspect it’s significantly more, now.
But this is all the wrong focus. The question shouldn’t be how much energy is being used, but how that energy is generated.
Once energy production has been taken out of the hands of the old, entitled industries and placed into greener, more sustainable methods, then conversations as in this thread will be irrelevant.
I hope you’re right. I read somewhere that the production of solar cells generates a lot of toxic and other nasty waste, so it is almost a zero sum game. I do admire the wind farms I’ve seen off the coast of the Netherlands.
I like the 24/7 “whump-whump” noise they emit, along with the occasional “thump” sound from a fallen bird.
I remember watching a documentary years ago where a Dutch professor not only pointed out the noise problem but also that the wind does not blow all the time.
His suggestion was to tap into the jetstream, no noise permanent wind. Everyone laughed!
Years pass and then a Google (alphabet) company announces commercial scale energy kites.
Maybe (jet) steaming will save the planet.
We’ve got eight windmills about 20 minutes walk from home. Most of the time they seem to be eerily silent whilst the blades are turning; only when wind conditions are just right do I hear the “whump-whump” noise. I suspect that they have also been positioned out of the way of bird migration paths, so the damage that they do to birds is probably less than that done by the local cat population.
No need to worry about migration paths. Birds will get out of their way.
But windmills do make us feel good about clean, renewable energy. 
