All in all, I am a fan of streaming and I am glad its available for us all at our finger tips. I've wanted that option for as long as I can remember and now its here. But for me, I believe its still got some catching up to do before it can better a ripped CD and likely a good CD Transport.
Hi Cjf
By way of advice and not criticism, I would rephrase the above paragraph to read as follows:
“All in all, I am a fan of streaming and I am glad its available for us all at our finger tips. I've wanted that option for as long as I can remember and now its here. But for me, I believe MY IMPLEMENTATION has still got some catching up to do before it can better a ripped CD and likely a good CD Transport.”
The sound quality of streaming is like a piece of string. The string is as long as you want to make it and the sound quality of streaming is exactly the same; as good as you want to make it.
So far I have continued to improve streaming to the point its now better than anything I’ve ever heard in 50+ years of systems, dealer events and shows. and up to now I‘ve not even found the ‘Law of Diminishing Return’s’ inflection point.
Essentially any changes to the network data stream‘s physical layer will change the quality of the sound you get and any improvements to the physical layer will improve the sound quality.
So is your network providing a data stream without noise, jitter, vibration and with perfect square wave bits? If not its the deviation from perfect that is impacting the sound quality of your streaming.
Initially it was thought that anything encoded with a digital pattern was enough for perfect sound. Unfortunately we’ve since discovered that not to be the case and that the quality of the encoding is where the magic actually lies.