I would edit my post, but 
, y’know.
Random anecdote.
A few years ago I was going to meet a recruitment consultant for a coffee. Realised I wasn’t good on her name, went to look it up and randomly thought “wouldn’t it be funny if she was [old colleague from Edinburgh]'s daughter”, because she had the same name.
Walked in and the first thing she said was “My Dad knows you!”.
He’s also called Guy and there had been an email mix up along the lines of “not meant for me, but I actually know this guy/Guy”.
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I bought an old Denon CD player this year, and now have a late eighties system. Cannot decide which is better, ripped CD from computer via Cambridge Dacmagic, or disc CD. Felt absurdly technocompetent because I cleaned the Denon’s mechanical bits and it stopped sticking/jumping.
I also like to burn a compilation CD as a Christmas card. I suppose I could send a round robin playlist but that seems a bit shit. My digitalness unravels as I get (even) older.
I’m averaging about one new CD a week these days, and have >2000 kicking-about the place.
Depsite having a fairly high-end CD transport, it doesn’t sound hugely better than the £60 Bluetooth streamer I use - latest codecs are really bloody good - and both are wired into the same DAC…
I started ripping some CDs about 15 years ago, but Microsoft determinedly deletes or misplaces accessory file info (anything from track numbers, thru dates to the names of albums and artists), and even if I edit the file data, it’s deleted again next time I go to play something, so along with the horrible UI of the various players I’ve sporadically experimented with, I got rapidly fed-up with the pointless faff and stopped ~100. Fucked if I was going Apple; Linux: get double fucked…
Nail in the coffin was the ready availability of streaming platforms - which are also a bit shit in their various ways, but convenient and not missing much content nowadays.
High-res feels like a dead-end to me, just like SACD and DVD-A. Sure, they can sound better, but unless Japanese audiophiles like the content, it mostly doesn’t exist. In any case loads of it is just upsampled from low bitrate PCM, and some of that came from very low quality analogue origins and was converted when the ADC technology was fucking awful. All at a premium price? Only so-much Patricia Barber I want to listen to, ta.
CD offers a degree of get-off-my-arse involvement that is a happy compromise between vinyl’s snap, crackle & pop ‘every-play-is-killing-this-hardware’ primo-faff, and the arse/sofa interface becoming permanently merged of streaming.
Works for me, YMMV…
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I’m somewhat close ish to this - the potential list of things to purchase this basically limited to what’s not available on Tidal, and there’s not much that’s missing these days.
I still buy 2nd hand cds,I just have no love for the media,and I just rip them to play on the squeezebox.
Personally I can’t tell any difference through the squeezebox or the cd player.
Admittedly the cd player is only a cheap Sony,but the squeezebox is hardly expensive.
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I blench when I see the price of a Squeezebox replacement. Then there’s all the network foo to wade through.
A WiiM Pro is hardly expensive
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But there’s learning new stuff…
Depends on your streaming app choice rather than the hardware.
The reality is that the Squeezebox hasn’t been a (supported) option for a long time.
I swapped mine out years ago, wasn’t a massive issue.
Interesting. My streaming so far has been Spotify to Google Chromecast (think now retired) - and it’s definitely worse than CD. I bought an Aries Mini right before I moved and haven’t had the chance to try it out yet - I’m sort of nervous to do so now in case it’s still not as good - but need to stop being a wuss and get on with it. Although now I can’t recall the advice on the best way to connect it… 
That’s going to be in part because Spotify tops out at 320Kbps, which is below CD quality, and they use Ogg Vorbis, which is a compressed format.
If you try it with pretty much any other streaming service, I’d expect the audio to sound better.
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I should have caveat-ed that statement with ‘…depending on the source files and originating device…’.
E.g. the lappy sounds better than my cheapo tartphone; and likewise files streamed from the lappy’s SSD sound better than from any third party offboard equivalent.
The CDT does still sound better, even like-for-like, than B/T - but there are MUCH bigger sonic differences going from one recording to the next than the exact playback path seems to make.
I’m pretty happy with all this being so - helps to keep the Audiophilia nervosa under control…
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I took the simplest, cheapest, lowest-effort route to getting my komputah! (or Sam’s 'phone) to play music via the hifi. The only faff ‘required’ was replacing the wallwart that powered the cheap-but-effective blue-tooth interface with an LPSU - and that was ‘preference’ not ‘necessity’.
Us forum people love to make our lives expensive and complicated and faffy, and psychologically it works - we become more engaged with music replay that way, more invested (in both senses), and simply by tinkering we placebo-up our perception of SQ: Every Tinker is an Upgrade!
But most of it isn’t actually necessary from a technical POV, only a psychological one…
Of course I may be talking out of my arse (this is always the likeliest conclusion) and mebbe my system sounds like total shite - I’ve no idea TBH, no-one else has heard it in years!
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I think if I went on one of those trace your forebears programmes I would find Ned Ludd to be a direct ancestor. I just hang a hard drive off the back of my Squeezebox. Any new tunes are added by unplugging the HD, walking it to my non-networked computer, and adding any newly ripped CDs.
Sounds like we may share an ancestor…
Indeed.
I plug a cheap disc reader thing into a laptop.
Rip it using dBpoweramp (the paid for piece of software that has paid for itself multiple times) which also adds the album art, straight to the NAS which also backs up .
Then use the wiim app on my phone to control everything whether streamed or stored anywhere on the network.
Simple and reliable
Good old Ned. All change is bad. The old ways are best.
I just play my CD’s via my CD player, pour a glass of booze and enjoy.
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I miss the witch burnings, f’sure.