Did you donate your compact discs to the Salvation Army or use them for target practice, or do you still have them on your shelf?
What are the advantages, if any, of playing compact discs, rather than streaming the exact same title and recording through a streamer + DAC?
If you still have and play compact discs, what CD transport do you use?
Yes I still play CDs.
I prefer vinyl of course, but a lot of classical music has only been available on CD (or latterly streaming) since the 90s or so, so CDs it has to be.
I stick with CDs not becase they are so great, but because file-based replay or streaming from online services totally sucks, for the following reasons:
1) I work in front of a computer all day, every day. The last thing I want to do is to interface with music through a laptop or ipad. It's a miserable way to select music when you ought to be skipping your fingers along a rack, feeling the music reaching out grabbing your interest.
2) CD sleeve notes aren't generally as good as you get with a decent LP / box set but are always going to be better than the average streaming service, many of which manage to omit even the composer's name from their standard view. (Utterly pathetic). Of course there are bolt-on services that provide more info and context as well as better-organised metadata, but really, why bother when you can lift a booklet and read without having to lift a laptop or ipad and scroll/generally faff about?
3) The ability to flick through infinite lists of music has led to a generation of people with the concentration span of a gnat, unable to sit and listen to a full length album. (Playlists are, of course, the work of the devil, allowing the intellectually challenged to skip more challenging tracks in favour of wall to wall easy listening). But seriously, when I have visited friends majoring on streaming, most can hardly listen through a full track without skipping forward, let alone the equivalent of a 'side' (20-25 minutes). It's awful.
4) Having essentially infinite stuff availalble on tap cheapens the listening experience and ensures younger generations will not get to know music as well as we oldsters did. Remember being 17 or 18 and owing maybe 20 or 30 albums, each of which was painful to buy (whole week's pocket money), and therefore carefully chosen and got played to death, so that even now many years later you still know every note, the precise duration of every pause, the phrasing and meaning of every lyric? What's the click-click-click equivalent? There isn't one. I would say especially at a young age (but at any age really) it's more valuable to really get to know well one or two Beethoven late quartets or piano sonatas than to have access to 50 full sets, likewise I own nearly every Dylan album and do play most of them once and a while .... but the most meaningful - and most often played - remain the same old handful from years back. Less is (frequently) more. The rhythm of human life is not well suited to infinities of anything.
5) Most streaming services are a bit rubbish - they tout hi-res in their sales material, but in fact most of their stuff is older lo-res, which is fine, but means their marketing claims are just BS. Plus of course the industry hasn't had a shake-out yet. It's highly likely that at some stage we'll see the balkanisation of content, so that eventually you'll need the music subscription equivalent of separate Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV subscription to hear a decent spread of labels. I think it's inevitable. Who would throw away their CDs in the face of that risk? How many times do you want to pay for the same favourite music?
6) CDs sound better. On my Audio Note transport anyway, into an Audio Note DAC. I've never really been impressed by any dedicated streaming solution - indeed 100% of the crappest systems at Munich the last couple of times I was there were driven by streamers of one sort or another. (Not just bad sound but a capitulation, for the most part). QED I would say.
Of course I do stream occasionally (using Spotify to audition new music, deciding whether or not to bother buying the LP or CD). But as a main source? I'd rather cut my ears off.