Exactly what is the difference, in technical terms not audiophile terms, between a “top level” streamer and a normal streamer?
Ralph
I’m tempted to say about £3k 
Short answer is I don’t know, my focus would be on how it sounds rather than (just) the technical differences. Although the Pro-ject Stream Ultra I’m currently assessing has had particular attention paid to noise and jitter - it has at least 8 power supplies in it for example - and that is definitely flowing through into the sound.
Phil
That extra 1 or 2% of “bigger soundstage” can cost a lot of money. I don’t think any one thing is responsible, instead a combination of several well known factors. I’m amazed how good a raspberry pi can sound compared to streamers costing perhaps 100x more.
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If the answer is based on “how it sounds” then a proper listening test is required. Maybe not double blind but at the very least blind since sighted listening tests are not too reliable. If a blind listening is not possible and measurements prove inconclusive then the sonic differences cannot be truly claimed, you know good old “expectation bias”
Let me gently point out that none of this is helping us figure out what to do with CDs once ripped! No, no, don’t throw things…
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True. Oops.
I sold several hundred cd’s for silly money, just to make space, and seriously regretted it about 5 minutes later. I’m keeping what I have left forever!
Okay here’s one - CDs from box sets make for great matching drink coasters.
I also sold my collection for peanuts but don’t regret it, though I did keep a handful of SACD & DVD-A titles & still have a few dozen LPs but no turntable – LOL.
Yeah, there were likely a few gems in the mix that I maybe should’ve kept but in the end I don’t miss moving 4 large boxes around, and the extra space gained in our storage room was a god-send.
I’ll never acquire (“collect”) physical media again. No CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray or whatever else comes down the road.
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Like you, i’ve I’ve kept my SACD collection, but got rid of everything ELSE that I can rip easily, CD’s etc
PLUS in my system at least, the streamed files sound much better than the CD’s, although this is obviously very source-dependant. My SACD player is a Denon DCD-A100, and NOT an Esoteric K-03X!
I sold my CD’s online. Got peanuts for them, but a whole double cupboard back in return. Worth it IMO.
I keep them just in case if catastrophic failure. Also I have to keep all my wife’s CDs as she refuses to use any non physical means apart from her iPod shuffle, which I have to update…
I thought it wasn’t “legal” to keep a rip after a CD had been sold. I could certainly be wrong, but that’s one of the reasons I have 2400 CDs on spindles in a closet.
That’s the case in the UK. Very unlikely to ever be tested but that’s one of the reasons I keep mine.
George may disagree on that. George Orwell. 
I don’t think you’re even legally allowed to rip CD’s in the UK if you want to get technical about it.
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That’s probably true, we were in a short window before industry interests got it reversed. As if ripping CDs is their major problem…
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Yesterday a friend came to dinner and gave me a CD as a belated birthday gift. I believe this was the first time I used my CDplayer in years, I really had to search for the play button, because I had no idea where it was anymore. So in other words, it shows I will probably never put on a CD again. I have still not completed my quest to rip all my CDs, but made a point of, if I want to listen to something I have to rip it first, that way hoping to speed up the process.
I am keeping my CDs in the livingroom and will do so for the predictable future.
Just one thought - Magnetical warfare 
theoretically the greatest weapon to really get everything to standstill, would be a giant magnetic field. Everything would be lost, nothing at all would work anymore. So sitting in the middle of the chaos, I could pop a CD into my player and listen to music, well hopefully still having electricity. 
Just joking, nothing to get paranoid about.
But it is worth a thought. Allways good to have physical media as the ultimate backup. But in general, just really make as many backups as you can and store them at different locations, shit does happen! Ripping and grooming can take years, shame to loose it.
A few years ago I went to my CDs to re-rip a The The CD from the early 90s. I was horrified to discover some visible fungi growing on the physical CD! Needless to say I was unable to re-rip that one.
Now I put sachets of salt in every box of stored CDs. I live in a small apartment and don’t really have a cool dry cellar for storage. If we want to store CDs we can’t ignore the physical conditions for that storage.
It is just unbelievable how long it takes to accurately RIP and then add/correct tags on a reasonable-sized CD collection. Losing all that work would be a nightmare.
I do still keep my physical CDs as a potential absolute last-resort backup but I say potential because I’m not sure what state they would be in if it were ever to become necessary to use them. There are a few online backup providers that offer relatively affordable unlimited storage plans (Crashplan and Carbonite are the two I use) so my main line of backup is having all of my rips on two separate RAID file systems and then also backed up to two cloud storage locations from different providers.
I think my backup arrangements are probably solid enough to mean it’s almost inconceivable that I would lose my music files (I’d need 4 concurrent drive failures plus two unconnected cloud backup companies having a data centre disaster or going out of business almost simultaneously) so I think now the main reason that I keep my physical CDs is because of the issue mentioned about it being a breach of copyright to sell them. I suppose I could just chuck them out, and I might still do that one day, but for now I have removed them all from the jewel cases (including the sleeve notes/covers) and store the CDs in paper sleeves (https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Compucessory-Sleeve-Envelopes-Window-W126xH126mm/dp/B0006HW668) which cuts down the space a lot. Just removing them all from the jewel cases took a lot of time.