Streaming is not as good as CDs played from transport or WAV or AIFF files from drive?

Roon Software Discussion
63

Never say never with your purchase history…. grin

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Lmfao.
You know me too well!
:sunglasses:

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I’m surprised I got a bit of leg pulling in before @Michael_Harris saw your post too!

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Thanks for the info. I am really liking my cassette playback lately as well. In my system my prob around 12K plus vinyl setup is far and away better than my 40K plus digital setup. CDs in the disc transport into the DAC via SPDIF are second best. WAV or AIFF downloads are third best. Qobuz is next in line. I like the sound of Qobuz over Tidal but I use both.

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Years ago I was spending a lot of time recording my vinyl via a Wadia 17 AD converter into an Alesis Masterlink CD recorder on Gold CDR. Those rips on my hard drive are usually far and away preferable listens to either the normal CD or even more so vs the streaming. Some of my favorite stuff is the stuff I recorded from records with my high end turntable rig

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I prefer ORWO cassettes played on a Russian Electronika mono cassette recorder. That’s what I grew up with, can’t shake it.

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I was dog walking in the South Wales rain.
So thanks for not giving @AceRimmer a walk :grin::+1:t2:

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You lucky dog, we had 4-track then 8-track and then cassettes, and not ORWO, finally DAT; all the while vinyl until that fateful day when the 44.1 16 bit medium became dominant. Had some 7" reels in there too for fun.

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To anyone here bringing the audio cassette in a sound quality related discussion: excuse yourself (and your deck) from this topic!!! :rofl:

Hint: there is nothing wrong with liking what you hear, but that’s all that cassettes should be about these days (and the vintage ones for that matter)…

And to qualify:
Well over my ears all kind of audio gears! :innocent:

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I am afraid we will have to agree to disagree.:innocent:
If only you could hear what I hear…:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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I’m not ready to give up cassettes. What would I do with my pencils?

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74

Ah, the ubiquitous 2hb hard at work…

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Reset all kind of (audio) appliances? :rofl:

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But not a tape cassette deck…:joy:

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My Electronika only needs one tool: a small screwdriver, to set the azimuth. Can you do that with digital??

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Why, does it keep changing? Temperature usually. Digital doesn’t do that, lol.

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In my system, Vinyl and MQA/Tidal sound different, but i’m not sure which I prefer. Vinyl rig is a Clearaudio Performance DC Wood, with Tracer Arm, Dynavector 20x2L cartridge, and Gold-Note PH-10 phono stage. Streamer/MQA Dac is a Gold Note DS-10 and external PSU.

so, not exactly equivalent spend, but enough to hear the differences!

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Interesting read. Here is my cheap system:

  1. Yamaha RX-A3080
  2. Klipsch RP-6000f
  3. S.M.S.L SU 9 (connected via XLR)

I have tried back -to-back listening and I cannot tell the difference between Spotify 320 and Deezer and Tidal. I have tried listening for every little nuance in the song, the instruments that you don’t even realise are there. High frequencies, low frequencies - I cannot tell. There are songs that kinda pop out, but I find that volume normalisation is the issue, when I correct for that, the differences I perceive disappear completely (you can set volume level for each source allowing for a great way to compare songs with different normalisation).

So, if you ask me to tell the difference between CD and high resolution tracks - I have no ears for that. if you do - I envy you a great deal. You are experiencing something I will never experience - which is quite sad truly but I am happy with what I hear so that is enough.

So - @ryan_stratton nothing wrong with your system setup. If you have seen the Netflix series “Sweet Tooth” - it means you just have that gene that gives you super hearing. So to people like me - it’s like discussing a rainbow with a colour blind person. Take full advantage of it - buy hi-res downloads and enjoy even more.

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To me, it’s more like discussing infrared and and ultraviolet with a normal person.

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No, it was to compensate for the small differences between cassettes. Back in the day, I was using the player to load programs into a ZX Spectrum computer clone. If the azimuth was a little off, you would spend 5 minutes just to get a CRC error at the end. So I drilled a hole in the case to expose the azimuth screw and made sure the sound was as sharp as possible before loading. And once you touched that, you kind of had to keep doing it for every cassette, even for music. There seemed to be a much larger azimuth variation with programs, most probably because everybody was messing with the azimuth, and all cassettes I could get were bootlegs.