Would you pay for high quality streaming?

[Spectral Morn]

This technology truly helped me rediscover music, and fall in love with music all over again. I'd never go back to the music that is arrested inside some dinky easily damaged plastic container (such as CD/DVD) that one has to rip the house apart in order to locate!

What crap...sorry but I am tired of this being used as a + point. It was used with vinyl and now CDs heck if you can't look after your stuff I despair. Every CD or vinyl record I have ever bought is in the same condition I bought it in. Its not hard to look after this stuff.

Unless my house burns down or blows up or gets wiped out by a tidal wave then I will always have them. Stick it on a HD and you have to do back ups and a back up of the back up in the hope the HDs don't go puff . Why would you be bothered.

You guys will pay a fortune and have nothing to show for it, nothing just a stream of one and zeros in a bloody HD or in a cloud . Count me out, I like having something to show for my money and I like going to real shops and talking to real people. You all want to become borg, go ahead. I can see it now fat blobs with no legs or arms (you don't have to move to access what does not exist)strapped with machinery linked to the web and music pumped into your brains as is the nutrients you call food. Hey sounds a bit like a Dalek.

Me I am off to the hills with my old fashioned enjoyable life and world.

Oh yeah don't get me started about on-line radio, FM rules.


Regards D S D L

[bigmoog]

What crap...sorry but I am tired of this being used as a + point. It was used with vinyl and now CDs heck if you can't look after your stuff I despair. Every CD or vinyl record I have ever bought is in the same condition I bought it in. Its not hard to look after this stuff.

Unless my house burns down or blows up or gets wiped out by a tidal wave then I will always have them. Stick it on a HD and you have to do back ups and a back up of the back up in the hope the HDs don't go puff . Why would you be bothered.

You guys will pay a fortune and have nothing to show for it, nothing just a stream of one and zeros in a bloody HD or in a cloud . Count me out, I like having something to show for my money and I like going to real shops and talking to real people. You all want to become borg, go ahead. I can see it now fat blobs with no legs or arms (you don't have to move to access what does not exist)strapped with machinery linked to the web and music pumped into your brains as is the nutrients you call food. Hey sounds a bit like a Dalek.

Me I am off to the hills with my old fashioned enjoyable life and world.

Oh yeah don't get me started about on-line radio, FM rules.


Regards D S D L

I 100% agree with this excellent post. Digital 'streaming' etc is another fad fueled by the sheeplike mentality that 'technology' is our saviour.

I spent 15 ears in I.T., of which 5 were in SuperComputing.....all my colleagues in science and I.T, just are astonished at the cost of 'high end' Harddisk and streaming kit...'a rip off'


the technology is always a moving target and subject to the human error in software construction......every 6 months we have an upgrade or new version of some such kit....anyone paying 1000s on a DS kit is a mug IMHO..........the masses are spoon fed a PC World overview of what It means to store and playback digital files..........and anyone claiming a 24bit studio digital master is the real thing hasnt got a f*****g clue about music or computing...or indeed reality.....no doubt some people will claim a certain 24bit download has PRAT and all else is gaslight zzzzzzzz


for the record I use apple kit to store and stream my digital files

[quadsugdenman]

Me I am off to the hills with my old fashioned enjoyable life and world.

Oh yeah don't get me started about on-line radio, FM rules.
Regards D S D L

+1

Technology in this particular case is for pure convenience and the music is certainly not the better because of it - Follow that Dalek I say !!

[Mr. C]

What crap...sorry but I am tired of this being used as a + point. It was used with vinyl and now CDs heck if you can't look after your stuff I despair. Every CD or vinyl record I have ever bought is in the same condition I bought it in. Its not hard to look after this stuff.

Unless my house burns down or blows up or gets wiped out by a tidal wave then I will always have them. Stick it on a HD and you have to do back ups and a back up of the back up in the hope the HDs don't go puff . Why would you be bothered.

You guys will pay a fortune and have nothing to show for it, nothing just a stream of one and zeros in a bloody HD or in a cloud . Count me out, I like having something to show for my money and I like going to real shops and talking to real people. You all want to become borg, go ahead. I can see it now fat blobs with no legs or arms (you don't have to move to access what does not exist)strapped with machinery linked to the web and music pumped into your brains as is the nutrients you call food. Hey sounds a bit like a Dalek.

Me I am off to the hills with my old fashioned enjoyable life and world.

Oh yeah don't get me started about on-line radio, FM rules.


Regards D S D L

You Go Neil,

Fire up that high horse again my good man

Why would you let yourself be used a '+' point you are an intelligent and articulate gent rise above it, after all you are a moderator and a great many people on AOS look up to you, why take the bait?

I would like place a couple of views on the table here, I for one have had CD's for nearly 20 odd years, they are in the condition pretty much I purchased them, so I do concur on this point Neil.

Personally my cd collection will not be transposed to HD at any point, as I have yet to hear ANY ripped cd sound as good as the original played through a system using the same dac as a conventional cd transport.

Now lossless red book and high resolution audio data files are a different matter, they are simply not affected by the same criteria that effects optical media therefore from a purely performance point of view it is for myself (and a great many others) a way forward in securing much better naturalness and musicality nothing more.
Pretty convinced most people given the choice (and hearing the difference) would opt for this route.

Now a great number of people wish to travel this path for purely ease of use, convenience only. Plus the ability to have they entire music collection in one small area. Less space, hassle and ear bending from the good lay for those it is a win<>win situation.

Not quite sure why you are so anti server/streaming based system, they can happily live in co-existence with other formats both vinyl and CD.
Certainly not expensive, to have a SB Touch £250 and a respectable dac £200-600 to compliment your system.
Backing up data, OK a Lacie Raid 2 TB off board drive around £150, certainly not strong outlay, most vinyl guys will think nothing of dropping between £900-£2200 on a cartridge at some point

If this is still too much 'grief' for you, try a 32 or 50G flash drive, simpler still.

The point of the reply is not to say 'bah, thrown away your CD's and Vinyl its old hat' far from it, use the true studio red book masters and high resolution files to enhance your system performance, not take over it.
Look at the balanced approach, the best of all three worlds, it will make your system more enjoyable, giving you greater listening pleasure and satisfaction, and in the long run that is what we ALL wish for is it not?

[lovejoy]

To all of those extolling the virtues of convenience in computer based audio, I say bah!

I've ripped and re-ripped my entire CD collection I don't know how many times now due to hard drive losses, format changes, platform changes, missing tag information, bad rips, changes in playback software etc. etc. etc.

I've then spent another age getting all of the artwork downloaded and making sure things were in the correct directories and labelled properly and in its right place.

Then another significant amount of time performing backups, or restores, mirrors and synchronisations between different pieces of equipment.

I'm not getting the convenience angle people!!

In the end I said B****CKS to all of this and started listening to vinyl again, and life is better for it.

Stop worrying about the bits and listen to the tunes.

[magiccarpetride]

It seems to me that Rome is burning while many play music off their computers. I fear the death of sound quality because those who care about quality are in the minority, even if they/you use a computer as a source. The majority of the public think MP3 is great

As far as sound quality goes, I don't see SACDs taking off any time soon. I think it's a dead format.

High resolution FLACs, on the other hand, are poised to take off. And guess what -- you can't burn those on a CD and play it back on your CD player.

[magiccarpetride]

What crap...sorry but I am tired of this being used as a + point. It was used with vinyl and now CDs heck if you can't look after your stuff I despair. Every CD or vinyl record I have ever bought is in the same condition I bought it in. Its not hard to look after this stuff.

Unless my house burns down or blows up or gets wiped out by a tidal wave then I will always have them. Stick it on a HD and you have to do back ups and a back up of the back up in the hope the HDs don't go puff . Why would you be bothered.

You guys will pay a fortune and have nothing to show for it, nothing just a stream of one and zeros in a bloody HD or in a cloud . Count me out, I like having something to show for my money and I like going to real shops and talking to real people. You all want to become borg, go ahead. I can see it now fat blobs with no legs or arms (you don't have to move to access what does not exist)strapped with machinery linked to the web and music pumped into your brains as is the nutrients you call food. Hey sounds a bit like a Dalek.

Me I am off to the hills with my old fashioned enjoyable life and world.

Oh yeah don't get me started about on-line radio, FM rules.


Regards D S D L

You seem to think that anyone who adopts digital streaming is obliged, by the law, to take all their CDs and burn them in their back yard.

I am here to educate you that this is not the case. I still have all my CDs, and can play them at will. I was not required by the law to get rid of them once I made a faithful replica and host it in the cloud.

Speaking of the cloud, if you go with a reputable vendor, such as Amazon, you don't have to worry about your hard drive going tits up. Amazon guarantees safety of your content, and its availability 24/7.

Another advantage of digital streaming for me is that any show I download, I can listen to the moment the download finishes. I don't have to scramble and dick around trying to find blank CDs to burn a copy I could play in my CD player. Same goes for the material my musician friends send me.

Last but not least, streaming bit-perfect signal into my Caiman DAC beats any CD player I've ever heard as far as sound quality goes (even beats turntables). It's a win-win-win situation all around.

But you guys are free to continue to act like three year old spoiled brats and continue throwing your futile tantrums.

[magiccarpetride]

I'm not getting the convenience angle people!!

That's because you don't have friends in high places who would educate you about the virtues of the cloud computing. However, count yourself lucky, because today is your lucky day. I am here to tell you that you can subscribe to the digital storage and streaming with a reputable vendor, such as Amazon (there are many, many others, of course).

Once you subscribe to their service, your digital media is guaranteed to be available to you 24/7, wherever the hell you are. And both you and I know that too-big-to-fail businesses such as Amazon, Google, etc. are not going out of business any time soon.

That's not convenient enough for you?

[Mike]

Streaming is the future... It's just the way it is!

[magiccarpetride]

Streaming is the future... It's just the way it is!

No, this can't be! Does it mean I live in the future? How?