Digital Drive

Posted by cawson@onetel.com (A) on December 10, 2023 at 08:46:37

In Reply to: RE: Ditto posted by garymuffley on December 09, 2023 at 22:31:45

Well, let's be fair! How much is the Audio Note transport and how much is the Bluesound 2i?

I've not looked up prices, but I suspect the AN is costly "hi-fi" while the 2i is perhaps less costly "mid-fi". Is so, that will easily explain why CD playback sounds marginally better than streaming,

Get yourself a hi-fi streamer and it's likely your findings will be reversed.

Think about it - you CD stores music digitally in 16/44.1 quality. Getting it off the disc in real time (that's how CDPs work) will inevitable incur some errors. These are explained by the imperfection in cleanliness of the CD itself, or the failure of the laser to pick up every single bit on the only occasion it examines the disc. Good CDPs include an error correction circuit that "makes up" missing bits to reproduce the missing ones as best it can, CDPs have been doing this for decades and have no better method.

The streaming service will have the exact digital file that the CD is storing if you are looking at Qobuz or Tidal's standard CD quality service - not Spotify or other MP3 quality streaming services. Your streamer grabs this file in batches and feeds it in ironed-out corrected time to the DAC. Not a single bit should be lost (unlike a CDP) so the sound quality should be marginally better than the CD.

If your CDs sound better, then get a higher quality streamer. If you want even better, use Qobuz HD files for better quality than CD can offer. Or look at Tidal's MQA files that use complex processing to imitate higher quality than CD - but this claim is often challenged!

For my money, a good streamer that outputs via AES/EBU (not optical or coax) should better the comparable output from a CD transport.

Remember also that the source (your CD collection vs the Qobuz library) is 1000 times bigger in the case of Qobuz.

I hope this simple explanation helps to show why well-streamed digital music should sound marginally better than the same digital music obtained via a CDP's laser as it scans the disc's surface in real time

Edits: 12/10/23   12/10/23   12/10/23