I mean, some people on here use plastic disks with metal needles to listen to music?
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I had the trial of Amazon Music first, and they let me download tracks to listen to offline. I looked in their folder to see how they avoided people stealing the tracks, and they have some method where they save the file in like 100 random numbered folders, each with tiny long random numbered files in it, Encryption could help spoof the scammers, too.
The sound quality of streamed tracks that get decompressed on the fly into ram are the two factors that degrade your sound compared to if you were playing them uncompressed from local storage. While it is impressive how small the hit we take from those two steps are, both ruin our listening. What people don’t realize while listening to streamed and compressed files, is that they’re being kept from being absolute slackers by the agitation of all the excessive noise that you’re hearing. If you were playing your tracks uncompressed from a local solid state type drive, you would not need that weed, your favorite tracks would be making you a drooling vegetable much better than that.
Amazon does that for when you want to listen offline. We still need that on subways in my city, :(. Amazon gives you the higher res versions for the same $10/month, it’s too bad their player software sounds like junk, like they all do except for Qobuz’s.
I buy the tracks I like the best, first because my favorites will not be the most streamed on the service, and my favorite artists will get no money for it, but also I can get that local storage uncompressed playback going on. I’m not happy about paying $25 for the latest higher res copies of albums, though. Especially since they’re usually still only 96k. It’s not until doubling that again that digital copies stop seeming as embarrassing vs what the analog was before. But then, our option for custom mixes and portability was tiny little cassette tapes, instead of mp3’s, wasn’t it? Now you can put a 1tb sd card in your player. The best cassette tape deck that got made was only the Nakamichi Dragon, for $3500. It did not send each channel to it’s own side of the case, where each side gets their own massive power supplies and serious analogue production, that aren’t shared with the motor’s power supply, and balanced outputs. There are DAC’s that not only do that, also. Music streamers win, they have destroyed radio, unless they talk.
I’ll keep paying my musicians, because they’re not just babbling drug dealers, like Jay-z, who owns Tidal, and probably wants MQA BECAUSE it’s a scam, and that’s what the most people are into.
Listening tests with Spotify Premium showed that downloaded Spotify tracks sounded worse than the same on-the-fly played Spotify tracks.
Matt
So where does Audirvana come in then?
It’s my preferred app for playing music.
Sweet, have you ever heard a windup turntable with a horn? Electicity lost something realistic when it started, then digital just held a tone without us gaining any more, although losing the tape helped before that. People on that little player will sound exactly like ghosts now. Digital gets played back by a chip that holds tones. But it could record what’s happening at every frequency with a number.
Something must have to be wrong, since Spotify is reading compressed files from a drive for you, and then sending them to you over the internet, on top of that. I find it to be a pleasantly small hit, considering all of that extra, but that doesn’t even have to be the case, if you can save to a drive, uncompressed on top of it.
I’m listening to a tuner while my main pc reinstalls windows now, and after this tuner that is much better than the built in ones I’d ever used before, radio is losing a lot in the first place. It’s not all getting transferred, although they sometimes play 70’s and 80’s records, that hadn’t lost too much of what the windup turntable with a horn sounded like, a few posts above, except for the move in the wrong direction down to 33 rpm. It’s possible the station has some better sounding 45’s. It used to be that a 45 was all you needed to make a lot of money off of a song, but now only video gamers don’t play in bands. The streaming companies say they pay everybody $1 per country they buy the rights for your track in, and only the top person gets a huge payoff for being #1, but not everyone even gets a dime.
You’re talking the streaming services more aimed at the general public. I wonder whether you have tried ones aimed at delivering highresaudio (like Qobuz, Idagio or Highresaudio)?
I subscribed to the highres streaming service Qobuz 2-3 yrs ago, because I find its streaming SQ good and its catalogue to my taste, moreover it provides (for classical music) the cd-booklets and no DRM.
Though I/we still hear the difference between a file played streaming* and the same file played from a local HD, i/we find its SQ good.
The icing on the cake for me is the Sublime subscription that allows you to buy highres files at a discounted price. And ‘no’, I don’t have any financial interest in Qobuz, I just enjoy music
*fibre internet 1Gbps, connected by CAT6
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I have lots of local files and will continue to purchase them. But I wouldn’t be without my Qobuz subscription either.
Interesting that the person who revived this long-dead thread about the superiority of music played from local servers never answered the question (so far as I’ve seen in a quick review) about whether he’s in the business of selling - wait for it - local music servers.
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This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
Hi guys,
The discussion about streaming vs local content seems to shifted a lot recently. I simply removed the last messages sent here, please stick to the topic and respect every membre in or outside this forum. Remember it’s a community forum, please keep the discussion simple and share your point on the subject.
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This topic was automatically opened after 3 days.
For both local files and streaming, Audirvana takes care of any decompression and upsampling, loads the resulting file into RAM, then plays it back from RAM. So what you are hearing in each case is a music file played back from RAM. Does anyone have a suggestion regarding what would make a sonic difference between two bit-identical files played back from the same location (RAM)?
Just my two cents. What I prefer is playing uncompressed FLAC-files when possible. These can be created with f.i. dBpoweramp .
However I don’t convert hires files but leave as these were created with professional solutions like Merge, which I think will not improve with simple user software. Further I try to limit processor usage, so no plug ins, upsampling etc. which I am reluctant to use anyway.
Upsampling will be done by the DAC chip if it isn’t done by the much more capable CPU, so the question isn’t whether to do upsampling, but where.
Regarding minimizing CPU usage, this is the primary reason to use a separate streamer. All this has to do, at minimum, is pass along the signal from Ethernet or WiFi to the DAC through a USB cable, while the computer doing the upsampling remotely can work as hard as you please without causing acoustic or electrical noise in the DAC.
The path of least resistance.
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This might be the case if you (a) stream and (b) use the dac of your computer, both of which I don’t
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The streamer is in actuality a self contained computer, in some cases including a built in DAC. Eversolo DMP-A6 just one of many, more coming shortly.
No mention of Audirvāna support yet unfortunately.
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Wonky UPnP support by the Eversolo was just noted in another forum (Audiophile Style). So you’re not alone, but I don’t know how good that makes you feel. 
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