Phew Tony, thought l was going out on a limb sharing those thoughts with Flac, glad you confirmed, l am not going 🤪 crazy

Damien

Brings back memories of CD Lathe and Green Marker Pens 😆
The quest for improvement

Back in the days, when l had a CD Lathe, l did quite a few experiments.
Latheing on certain Disc's would sometimes transform the sound,alot of disc where not perfectly round, so they would wobble in standard format,making it hard work tracking the CD.
Funny how digital still needed accurate mechanism,almost analogue on the physical media.
Using CDR was interesting, where you can hear the difference, however the biggest shock was burning on Black coloured CDR, it would sound better, l'm guessing it was down to a reduction in laser light reflections, l certainly enjoyed those days, but glad l have abandoned CD generally.

I do have a suite of CD treatments
They are all good

Barry Diament (mastering engineer) thoughts on CD-Rs sounding better.

forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/fact-or-fiction-your-thoughts.83595/

I have been reading this thread with some interest and it has raised some good points. However I still find some of the issues raised around digital music somewhat perplexing, here are some of my observations.

I state this having been a very early advocate of CDs, from 1983 when first appearing in shops, my vinyl collection was ditched and we ended up with over 800 CD in 10 years. I went through various CD players to try and get something that sounded good, each time becoming more expensive, the music and hifi industry kept telling me CD was the best, so I persisted. Then MP3 players and equivalents came along in the late 90's, and a mass rush to this happened, even I foolishly started using the format, only to quickly become even more disappointed with the poor SQ, and the wall of sound wars made matters even worse. I even transferred all my CDs to a NAS drive around 2005, I have now done this twice to ensure I gained the best possible clean data transfer on the second time.

In the end I conducted many digital file comparisons of different formats from low to high level frequency various bit levels, and ensured as much as possible they were from same original master tracks, very few gave me a warm feeling, it just proved to me that the majority achieved average to poor SQ. Although a high quality CD on my Meridian 508 sounded pretty good, but this was hit and miss. somewhat confusing as the redbook 44.1khz/16bit was chosen as a level that achieves a high sound quality for human hearing, but it was apparent not all CDs are equal. So I just gave up completely and stopped properly listening to music at home or owning anything that might be called HiFi for over 10 years. 

When I eventually came back to listening to music for pleasure it was mainly with vinyl, I had been given a very nice selection of albums, and selected known good quality CDs or SACDs. A gradual process of Hifi upgrades were undertaken, mainly Amps, speaker and Turntable until I got to the system I enjoy the sound of and own now.

Then digital streaming became a viable possibility and about 4 years ago I put my big toe into that pond in the hope that it may prove that the digital medium had reached a level that could produce a good and consistent level SQ. Initially a RPI/Hifiberry running Volumio, I still use this for casual reliable listening, then a Sonore microRendu into the DAC of the Audiolab 8300CDQ, not top end stuff I know but both produced reasonable sounding music without an enormous outlay.

Unfortunately I have found it all to be somewhat disappointing, but occasionally it can be sonically rewarding. Why am I disappointed? My observations are that the industry, music and electronics(LoFi/Hifi) have continued to state digital gives the best SQ and VFM, but IMHO that is really not true is it? I find it very frustrating that even now if you want to consider using digital as a serious listening medium for streaming you need to consider, using 4G/5G bluetooth rather than the normally used broadband, and then you need to consider cleaning ethernet up, before getting to the streamer/DAC, technically Wifi/Bluettoth streaming just leaves the medium open to interference, so hard wiring or optical is required, although many as I see it tend to ignore this, and then there is re-clocking to get the best from the digital stream. We are 40 years down the digital music road, surely manufacturers could and should have resolved these issues cheaply and simply and in a same box solution by now, but it appears not, maybe they do not want to? Currently as it stands to me it appears that to reach digital nirvana the cost certainly is not cheap, from my understanding at least £5-10k needs to be considered just to address the digital processing prior to the analogue signal reaching a pre-amp. 

Then as others have suggested putting high quality digital music on solid state devices to play directly from gets the best results, but this still means more costs and still raises questions about how and from where you achieved that? And of course there is the hoary old topic of the quality of the digital files and where and how they were originally sourced, I think most of us on here would accept that TIDAL has been shown to be very questionable in this area. Spotify is also IMO not all that is appears even at Premium level streaming at its servers they can be throttled at peak times so you may not be getting what you think when you listen, I suspect this may be true of other Streaming providers as well. 

I have raised many issues questions here I realise and some may be contentious, yes digital can sound good to me it feels rather contradictory that this can only be achieved to a high level with a high cost and often with unnecessary complexity to achieve that for the end user. I completely accept that other music mediums have their issue as well and vinyl can easily go from poor SQ to outstanding depending on various variable in the process from creation the what is used to reproduce it, but digital music seems to have ended up going down the same rabbit hole and possibly more so.

Adrain
thinking about this, seriously get your self a listen to a X26 dac and sensible digital transport it will surpise you if you are traditional vinyl head its cost is £1400.

Although much the asame as a good deck need a decent arm/ quality cart/ phone stage and cabling, you will require similar treatment of the digital chain but not to the same degree.

Back when I first started with audio the shop onwers would sneer at you if you mentioned digital, but it also it genuinelly cost more to obtain a close proximity to how vinyl sounds usually three times as much now things have progressed and its the other way round, a good respectable £4K streamer can easily compete with £3K deck/2k ARM/ 1.5k cart plus a phonostage of around £1K+ which one you prefer is your choice, but the lack of boxes, ball ache and music libary restrictions and more often than not SQ  are now big deciding factors on how people purchase.