I’ll trust your ears and mine, but I’d rather that trust be verified with a scope 
To take this back on topic: @Christoph_Longree, the best advice I can give you is to get the dust off that USB DVD player that’s in the box behind the dirty mop in your utility closet, use a ripper that checks against the AccurateRip database, and unless you enjoy spending money and/or inconveniencing yourself, demand evidence from those who claim there’s anything that can’t be extracted in a few passes.
Well, just the ones who want to claim that. The ones who don’t usually just don’t say anything.
… well, I just pulled out an old Marantz CDP - no high-end and no big player, but still a solid CDP. Connected it to the DAC via Coax and compared that to the streamed FLAC via ROON.
Streaming lossless FLAC via ROON was clearly better.
So the remaining question is, if a high-end CD Transport will really bring a huge increase in SQ or if the stream is just as good. Ill see if its worth checking out…
I think you will be hard pressed to find a standard CD transport outperform a computer based solution. The CD mechanism has to physically decipher the music files. In the computer based solution, that step has already been accomplished.
Wow. I am amazed at this conversation. So if I had a $20,000 dCS CD player the thinking here is that if I compared it to a cheap $50 RPi plugged into a $100 DAC that the RPi would sound better because it’s computer audio? Really?? My experience tells me differently. I have heard it too but that can’t be right because ripped audio sounds better than the physical CD no matter the external factors. That’s what I am hearing here.
No. but I do believe, that differences are more marginal than one might expect and given equal quality of playback components - say a 10k CD Transport versus an equal streamer, quite probably the technical advantage of streaming may make it a more superior source… but all together I don`t think that there will be worlds between the two… I will test for myself though ad try to get some serious CD Transport for a few days from my retailer…
Don’t get obsessed with “better”. I’d rather say properly ripped FLAC files properly handled sounds no worse than the physical CD, no matter how much you paid for the CDP (price is a faulty measure of quality, anyway).
A DCS CD player is hardly a standard player. Comparable players at a similar price point have an additional step with those pesky transports. IMO, you would be better off with a Aurender W20SE. but those are $22K… 
[Moderated] I must have been stupidly obsessed with better.
I think you’re being too hard on yourself there. I wouldn’t say “stupid”. Maybe short-sighted, though. The truth is that we are so close to the limits of perfection in audio equipment these days that “better” refers to tiny, usually inaudible, differences that are hard to even measure, let alone hear. So thinking about what’s better than something else has to some extent become a self-defeating game.
But anything with moving parts, a big rotational disk which must be controlled exactly, has multiple failure modes which aren’t present in all-solid-state all-digital systems, but will still suffer from many of the failure modes which those digital systems have as well. So I’d say, just from analysis, that a CDT is more likely to have transparency anomalies than a FLAC file (or WAV, or what have you). A CDP, which I guess would also include an on-board DAC, might indeed sound “better” than a FLAC file run through an inferior DAC, but it’s really easy to make an almost perfect DAC these days, and not expensive.
And using price points to gauge quality… I realize that the manufacturers don’t give a consumer much in the way of objective specs on their equipment, particularly manufacturers who sell to the luxury market and depend on their marque to move product, and that the price is one of the few things consumers get to know about the equipment, but it doesn’t mean it’s indicative of performance.
I was being facetious.
And I wasn’t. Horses for courses, I guess.
There’s some interesting questions here. Is streaming/HDD playback intrinsically superior to playback from CD? I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s arguable that transports such as the PS Audio Memory Player that read the disc into memory and play it from there are trying to emulate the better features of “computer” playback. Didn’t some of the late Meridian players and transports use computer-style DVD-ROM drives to spin the disk multiple times at high speed to essentially “rip” the disc into an error-corrected memory? (This is from a half-remembered article or a magazine review I’m sure - and may be inaccurate.)
I guess the point is that a high end player or transport will deploy techniques to get the most out of discs. Similarly we can refine our streaming/file-based playback systems (separating the core computer from the endpoint/transport seems a good start). I think it’s rather pointless to chase perfection (generally a fruitless and expensive endeavour in hi-fi), or to try and find which is “better” from disc or file-based playback. If you enjoy handling discs, Roon (or something like it) is never going to do it for you.
Conversely, If you enjoy queuing music up from your tablet or phone then fumbling in piles of CDs to find that particular track you want to hear is not going to work for you. For me, the discussion is an interesting but theoretical one. I’d rather not sweat the small stuff and get on with enjoying the music
I see in South African local news that Musica, SA’s biggest CD / DVD retailer is closing all its 78 stores.
They were the main “Mall Retailer” for CD’s etc. They blame the increase of streaming.
It’s like when Tower Records closed in the US. It was a very sad day.
I am sure more will follow , other than small independent shops this leaves no specialist CD shop to my knowledge in Northern Suburbs JHB , the affluent bit !! The only other decent one went a few years back. Musica was really strange it was owned by a major pharmacy chain, hardly a good business match.
Well, when it comes to owning a physical collection, Vinyl is far more loavable. As to SQ - I always thought Vinyl sounds better (in terms of more pleasant to me) - then again it`s maybe a question of equipment (I have over 30k invested in analog playback, whereas digital ist just Roon > Auralic > integrated DAC)… but picking up on the topic, if streamed music is as good or better than CD played via Transport, then the logical consequence is, that people collect Vinyl (in my case for SQ and owning) and the CD is replaced via streaming services…
I think CDs have their place for those of us who enjoy the ownership model rather than renting music. It’s still a great carrier for digital music, even when we just rip and store. My collection these days is a mixture of ripped CDs and downloads, plus vinyl which definitely plays second fiddle for me . I tend to only play CDs “physically” when they’ve just been purchased / before they’ve been ripped.
I use a QNAP nas which is the ROON core, a Pi3b and HiFiBerry Digi HAT.
I have 2 CD transports and Roon beats them both.
Using a Naim Unitiqute 2 and Meridian M100 speakers
I have actually been experimenting quite a bit in the past few days and I have not found any CDT that actually beats Roon Playback in terms of SQ yet…