@CanadianMaestro: I agree with you, for most people it should sound fine and it's a convenient solution.
I'm more interested to find out your personal opinion, your own conclusion.
For me, in order to hear the differences, I think it takes
educated ears,
good gear and to be sure you compare
identical track versions (not old vs. newly re-mastered versions).
Most people have trouble distinguishing between mp3 and flac versions and they don't own expensive gear.
My personal conclusion is that
streaming over internet is a convenient but not really an ultimate audiophile solution.
And:
- it's not Tidal's fault, assuming they send the flac correctly
- it's not gear manufacturer's fault (Bryston or others), they receive the bits via the Internet via streaming
I'm just curious if Bryston found a way to solve this maybe via some buffering...
It seems to me that the music is
dead on arrival because of the streaming protocol, the transport.
What happens between the two ends takes a toll on the sound quality.
In my opinion, the only reliable way to have the maximum of quality is
downloading the entire file, not streaming.To illustrate this:
Imagine your
network player doing streaming of a track from a
NAS in your local network at home.
The
digital signal will pass from the
NAS through one or more
Ethernet cables and/or maybe a
router or
switch (or even more) in its way to the streamer/player.
A lot of people try these days to
optimize that :
- by using expensive audiophile Ethernet cables,
-
replacing the power adapters of the NAS and routers/switches with
clean and
stable linear power supplies (LPS) or batteries
And notable
improvements could be heard in a decent system! I enjoyed them, too.
Now imagine the
NAS is a
Tidal server located somewhere on the "web" and between it and your system is "the internet"
No more audiophile cables and LPS
The real-time audio digital signal travels through a web of cables and gear with dubious power supplies out of your control.
Only the
download is guaranteed 100% bit perfect but
streaming will affect the timing, will suffer from jitter and packet loss.
Eager to hear some opinions from "technical" guys, I could be wrong on what was stated above and I accept that.