It seems that I'm an audio Rip Van Winkle

The Strat (Fender) posted:

Yeah I’ve got a free Tidal trial which I am going to make full use of.    

Regards,

Lindsay

The 90 day free hi-fi subscription made it easy for me to just keep on rolling with the $20.00/per mo subscription. I have listened to an unknown number of artists, new and old, and have been exposed to some genre that I may not have given a spin if I did not have the easy accessibility offered by TIDAL streaming. Between the NAS and TIDAL I am very happy.

The wife likes the idea of a CD player, she likes the ease and comfort of the familiar and I would not mind a revisit to the days of vinyl for nostalgia reasons but the cost of building a album collection again is a discouraging thought.

It is nice to have so many choices!

TOBYJUG posted:

The ethical side should be considered. Most Artists get about 13p a year for the material that gets streamed from sites. The rest of your subscription goes to the big Stream cheese.

13p in the collective sense. Not just from your subscription but from everyone's.

a well known recording artist told us they received £0.13 from Spotify last year on material NOT ON GENERAL release but still available to stream.

White labels, dub cuts, limited releases and other fringe based artists. All fall outside. That's why some have found it more financially beneficial to actually give it away than have it taken.

TOBYJUG posted:

TOBYJUG posted:

The ethical side should be considered. Most Artists get about 13p a year for the material that gets streamed from sites. The rest of your subscription goes to the big Stream cheese.

13p in the collective sense. Not just from your subscription but from everyone's.

a well known recording artist told us they received £0.13 from Spotify last year on material NOT ON GENERAL release but still available to stream.

White labels, dub cuts, limited releases and other fringe based artists. All fall outside. That's why some have found it more financially beneficial to actually give it away than have it taken.

Don’t just blame the streaming companies...

While artists are making very little money and streaming companies are struggling to make a profit; record labels are making ... well ... record profits!

Eloise posted:

Arguably “ripping” a CD and then perhaps using the files on a memory stick would cut out more of the middle man... reading a CD in real time is a fairly difficult job where’s ripping it allows multiple reads to ensure it’s read accurately.

The middle man you pay using this approach is for the gear required to rip the CD and the memory stick for storage. Plus your time and effort. Why not simply play the CD directly? Do you think the 'inaccuracies' in direct CD replay are actually audible or more of a theoretical argument? However difficult the job of reading a CD in real time might seem, any CDP I've ever owned, at any level of cost, has been adequately engineered to successfully (and to my ears accurately) play a CD.

joerand posted:

Eloise posted:

Arguably “ripping” a CD and then perhaps using the files on a memory stick would cut out more of the middle man... reading a CD in real time is a fairly difficult job where’s ripping it allows multiple reads to ensure it’s read accurately.

The middle man you pay using this approach is for the gear required to rip the CD and the memory stick for storage. Plus your time and effort. Why not simply play the CD directly? Do you think the 'inaccuracies' in direct CD replay are actually audible or more of a theoretical argument? However difficult the job of reading a CD in real time might seem, any CDP I've ever owned, at any level of cost, has been adequately engineered to successfully (and to my ears accurately) play a CD.

Both of these positions are correct (and oddly, not in conflict!).

With well made CDs with few and only minor errors (easily correctable C1 errors), then a CD player will normally retrieve a bit-perfect data stream in real time, and the reduction in quality due to the error correction work will tend toward being unnoticeable.  However if a disk has C2 errors, then CD players will start to struggle and will usually simply blank that part of the signal, substituting a very short section of silence, and thus loosing information.

A computer ripping a disk with C1 errors will be able to completely correct them and produce a bit-perfect file.  When ripping a disk with C2 errors it can read the data frames containing the errors multiple times using 'raw' mode, and then take a statistical guess at the data that should be there.  Very often most of the data in the area affected by the C2 error will still be read consistently leaving only a smaller section of data that can't be recreated statistically, so only this area needs to be blanked, rather than all data in all the frames affected by the C2 error.  In this case the computer generated file is better than the data retrieved by the CD player.

Whilst for most disks there is no difference (no C2 errors), I have experienced this difference occurring with the occasional disk.

Hi Bill, welcome back.  Hope you have been well.  As age 70 has been on the horizon, I made a decision a few years ago that it was senseless for me to continue buying physical media (ie: accumulating stuff).  My spouse and I have no children and essentially no family.  I ripped all my cds to my laptop and subscribe to Spotify and have enjoyed my music just fine.  Having retired, music occupies roughly 50% of my time now and that has been pure joy.  Hope the Rega speakers continue to satisfy.  Amongst the moralizing and self-proclaimed listening acuity ratings above, I hope you have also found some insight on whether streaming is of further interest.

Take care, Jeff A

Thanks Jeff, your comments are much appreciated. 

A few years back I did upgrade my turntable setup. My old Linn Basik was getting pretty long in the tooth. I was actually pretty happy with the Basik overall, but I wasn't feeling totally confident in the long term functionality of the motor. So when a good deal on the RP3 presented itself I went for it. Replacing my old Standesign wall-mount turntable shelf with a newer replacement unit from Rega might have provided greater benefit than the turntable change itself.

After that, I simply returned to listening to my music, once again forgetting about the components involved. That is where I find myself once again now that the new Rega RX3 speakers are in place. I've been re-visiting all kinds of CDs and albums since installing the RX3s and at this point I have little desire to accumulate any new music. In fact, I'm really out of touch when it comes to the current music scene (and this is coming from a guy whose main reason for living in Austin, Texas many years ago was to take in as much music as possible). I do feel that is a shame, but I'm really not sure how long it might be before I feel the need to once again start adding to my music collection. When that time comes, I suppose that I then might begin to consider other mediums for playback. 

For now, I'm plenty happy with where things stand at the moment. I stopped worrying about most things involving music playback long ago and was grateful to be able to do so. I'm in no hurry to return to that mindset. I found that constantly fretting over how I could further improve things tended to take away from the enjoyment I was getting from that gear which I already owned and therefore also somewhat diminished the enjoyment that I was getting out of listening to music which was the real shame. This last experience brought on by the speaker swap which in turn highlighted the change in the playback landscape was interesting enough to me to warrant a post or two here on the forum again after a very lengthy absence. Should I ever decide to enter into more modern front-end playback options, it's more than apparent that unlike with the Rega RX3s, I'll be able to find plenty of information on all of my available choices. For the time being, I'll simply be heading back to the comfort of my couch while enjoying the gear and music that I already own and happily so. Thanks again to everyone who has taken the time to comment in response.

Huge posted:

With well made CDs with few and only minor errors (easily correctable C1 errors), then a CD player will normally retrieve a bit-perfect data stream in real time, and the reduction in quality due to the error correction work will tend toward being unnoticeable.  However if a disk has C2 errors, then CD players will start to struggle and will usually simply blank that part of the signal, substituting a very short section of silence, and thus loosing information.

I've never experienced this with direct CD replay (barring a disc with heavy scratches; presumably causing diffraction). I have on rare occasions noticed "blanks" in MP3 replay on an I-pod shuffle. Blanks, and some brief passages I can best describe as a "microsecond of high-frequency squeak".