Can you explain that please, and what do you mean by ’inaccurate’?
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I was just about to ask you about this but Simon beat me to it.
Curious. With our system playing CD’s via our Moon 260D Transport/Qutest DAC was very clearly more musically involving than playing the same CD’s ripped (using a Melco D100 drive) to our Melco N50-S38. This despite having Chord M6 and S6 mains blocks, Chord Ground Arays, Power Arrays, EE8 Switch and EE1 isolators. None of this network and system fettling, although it certainly improved things, could bring the Melco up to the musical standard of playing CD’s.
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As someone who as reintroduced CD again from being streaming only.. one thing I have found is cloud streaming tends to use different masters or processed masters compared to older CD masters, as streaming providers operate within thier LUFS standards. CD is typically mastered, especially older masters to less aggressive LUFS standards… so in that sense CD can be more ‘natural’ to the original mix master and less processed compared to cloud streaming… but I admit sometimes I prefer the additional processing from cloud streamers..
Now if you rip a CD and playback then clearly this is moot, as local streaming (UPnP) in terms of sound data is identical to real time CD playback… but not necessarily so for cloud streaming.
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Try burning on the lowest speed, 2x speed is best.
Use CD-R, not CD-RW…
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When I burn I use 1x speed. Are you saying you have found 2x to be better than 1x?
Yes, I have all three mediums, streaming, CD and vinyl.
Radio is via streaming, and I have to say that Radio 3 full HD is very, very good.
My tuners are either gone or waiting an end they don’t deserve
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It is rather good.. yes all the so called HD BBC web radio streams use 320 kbps AAC .. I just wish in 2026 they used FLAC for their HD streams at least for Radio 6 and 3 .. it seems in this day and age limiting yourself to bandwidth limited psycho acoustically masked codecs that are largely from a different era of reduced internet bandwidths is irksome.
Sadly the BBC has no plans for lossless audio so I understand. The BBC of 2026 doesn’t appear to prioritise audio fidelity in the same way as yesteryear… they are now in the hard nosed commercial world of good enough for the majority.
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The critical difference here is that, whether you are streaming across a network or, as was the case with us, streaming directly from a storage device (Melco) to a DAC via USB, you are introducing network noise into the equation. Using the Melco as we did still involves having it connected via ethernet to allow wireless control from an app, even though no music data is propogating through the network, only control data.
Everything I’ve experienced has convinced me that noise of any description severely impacts upon musical coherence and this is especially true in streaming systems of any kind. That’s my experience but I know some others have found the opposite - and this puzzles me.
But the ‘network noise’ is out of band noise like noisy mains, or noisy mains, RF noise, you name it. That is almost entirely mitigatable to the point of being moot with quality equipment and setup.
To be clear you are not introducing ‘noise’ into the audio programme material itself..
I like probably many of us know when audio sounds ‘off’. When that happens it can be through the effects of out of band interference. I have found seperating my DAC from my streamer and CD transport provides a high level of audio performance consistency… and reduces the effects of out of band new from the network streaming process or the CDM.
Totally this.
I’ve posted about it in detail in the past, but (TLDR) the number of ‘beloved’ albums from the 80s that I’ve bought on late-90s ‘remastered’ CDs that I physically cannot listen to all the way through is depressing. Rebuying the same albums in their original 1980s masterings for tup’pence on Discogs has been a jawdropping revelation by comparison. And they say 80s digital kit was rubbish!
It’s almost impossible to tell exactly which master the various streaming platforms offer, but in my limited experience it’s not often the original.
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Yes it’s out of band noise. Not quite sure what you mean by not introducing it into the audio programme itself. This noise (and obviously it’s not audible noise!) impacts on things like tonality, timing and explicitness of musical phrasings etc. It’s a well recognised phenomenon and hence the proliferation of switches and various network noise reduction devices. All of which helped - but not enough. Disconnecting the system from ethernet resulted in a very noticeable improvement indeed - as did disabling the wi-fi on our BT router.
I needed to understand this more when I released some of my mix masters to for streaming. I had to remaster with differing LUFS levels for the streamers compared to my main master. One master I got slightly wrong… and was processed by the streamer service provider, it sounded bad with obvious pulsating compression being audible.. so I had my distributor re provide it..
It is not as easy to follow the tune and the bass is not as tight etc.
My experience was the exact opposite!
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If done badly… if done well then dynamic compression actually makes the track easier to follow and sound more powerful… in someways for some that might be counterintuitive… as there is an adage in some audiophile circles that all compression is bad… which is clearly nonsense.
However you need to be in control of these mastering parameters for it to sound optimal and not leave it to a machine to do
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Exactly.
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Dear Pete,
I was using a very good deck. A Vertere DG1s with a phono1 and an AT540VML. I has swapped about on the streaming side for a while trying to get it closer to LPs.
Im a very long term Qobuz and Audirvāna user. Audirvāna is a computer music renderer controlled by an iPad app (like roon). It manages the library (in my case on a NAS), radio and streaming accounts. The Mac (or PC or Linux) generates a pcm music stream and sends it to the streamer via upnp. This off loads a lot of the processing to the Mac rather than the streamer. I’ve found it superior to any streamer I have tried alone. (Devialet, NSS222, Atom HE). Back in the day I started using it with a Mac- toslink to an nDAC.
The key for me was firstly to switch to the Linn Organik DAC wihich has beautiful,layers, textures and control. Audirvāna adds a better balance with a little more bass and a slightly warmer more vinyl sound. I accept it’s very much a personal thing. I had a more complex set of switches but in my set up I found all I needed was the single EE8 - Farad. Important which cable you use on the final leg. An audio quest vodka was too harsh. So now have a SoTM cat 7.
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Are you sure you Streamed a accurate ripped CD ,when comparing ?
I suspect this was true when CD burners applied constant linear velocity at lower speeds, which is the ideal mode for creating music CD-Rs. Nowadays they all at least use zone CLV or variable speeds.
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Thanks for explaining Brendan. I’ve read very good things about the various Linn streamers and were I ever to return to streaming, which I think is highly unlikely, then these would be top of my list for investigation.