Bartok better playing CDs or Streaming?

Hi, testing during some days playing CDs or Streaming with my Bartok I found better sound and better feeling and emotion playing CDs with my Marantz SA 11 S3 (coaxial output) as transport instead streaming same music with Tidal MQA or Flac. Upnp playing is also better then streaming Tidal, but at least for me not as good as CD,s playing. Your experience is the same? There is a reason ? Or is only vintage suggestion…umm.

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These comparisons are almost impossible to arrange so that you are truly comparing like with like. For example you have no way of establishing that the CD you have of the same album being streamed from Tidal is from the same master. Even CDs of the same album from differing counties can sound different depending upon the glass disc authoring and /or pressing plant due to the particular production facility’s technical house rules e.g. only allowing a given maximum dynamic range.

Further by reading many postings around the web it appears that the fundamental sound from Tidal is generally held to be inferior to that of Qobuz irrespective of MQA ( which is another can of worms). So a change to Qobuz may provide a closer match with the original CD ( may :wink:).

UPnP rips of CDs ( rather than downloads) should sound identical to the source CD. However it is difficult to arrange fair comparisons even for this as in many circumstances things like the cabling involved cannot be duplicated for the two sources.

My take is that you found what you found, however that does not mean that it can thereon be applied universally.

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I agree, and in my experience it is also true that Qobuz sounds better than Tidal.
Hardly generalizable or reproducible, though.

But one thing I noticed: since I have had the Rossini I find myself listening to the music much more than evaluating quality, tweaking things, dreaming of a new amplifier, or looking for new cables or antiresonance feet.

Andrea

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I agree with both of you, I’m listening more music with the Bartok first and is a very difficult and not very precise test how I’m doing…but I think the perception is clear better CD and Upnp then Tidal ( thinner sound, less “meat”, less emotion. I had in the past Qobuz and Tidal and Ieave Qobuz…seems it was a mistake. The problem now is I have a big playlists and favourites list in Tidal and I think I will miss all of this going to Qobuz…

There is a way of transferring your playlists from Tidal to Qobuz:

Thank you very much !

a few days ago we did some tests with my Bartok, there were 4 of us and we all agreed;
we compared 4 sources, all connected to the Bartok;

  1. flac file from Nas Synology
  2. Naim cdx2 + xps cd player
  3. cd Esoteric P03
  4. same file from Tidal

Result: 1 and 3 clearly better than 2 and 4