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In the Forum: Melquiades Amplifier
In the Thread: Valve Preamplifier for Macondo/DSET
Post Subject: Streaming vs. Streaming.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 4/28/2019
Again, I have advocated this subject again and again. Streaming is not a second-class source. It is all depends of what you are streaming. If you stream a source of unknown origin (which is 99.9% of the files that you do now own) then it is wild west and you deal with absolutely unpredictable quality. A single and simple rate conversion, volume change or any other DSP processing on the side of the file owner will lead sonic degradation much greater then use of a few shifty line-level preamps sequentially connected. So, when I am taking about streaming and if we presume a conversation have any sense then we are talking about streaming our own files, known to use quality from our own drives. “the albums are downloaded first” in most of case are very bad. The houses that sell music files has no sound quality working culture; this has been proven zillion times. You basically have mp3 leave crap that being unsampled to the format of your choice. 
 
Even if you have a production CD that might act as a common reference of some kind of quality then there is a great variation how the CD was pressed, who did it and what vintage of the pressing. Not the last factor is how the CD was ripped. There are great differences and have seen some stanning examples that quality of ripped made huge difference. So, streaming might mean absolutely different things. The best streaming that I have seen were raw digital master-copies sold to me non-commercially with an assurance that there was no processing on the files performed or my own digital files made from my own conversion of some of my LPs.

Again, most of the crap out there is garbage on term of sound quality  unless you know (trust) the source personally and can control the whole chain.

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