Hello Franco, and congratulations! My brief answers follow; hopefully others with more experience and knowledge will chime in:
It will benefit more first from reliable power. Reliable, clean power is very important. I like to use quality power cables myself, but the power itself is most important.
No clue. I think “synergy” is an overrated concept in this context. Good power and quality cables; I can think of no reason to have different cables. Consider what is happening to the power as it goes into your components, and what sort of wiring is being used there, before one tries to change physics between the wall and the internal power supply.
Don’t know. Doubt it. I have the RS-232 cable connecting my DAC and Upsampler. Network isolation has been unaffected. And I was only aware of that when I discovered one day that the cable had become disconnected. Zero sonic impact for me.
I have to confess ignorance. I took a quick look at the Accuphase website, and didn’t see any model with a Clock input. If you have one with a clock input, I don’t see why not. But there are others here with significantly greater experience with cross-platform clocking.
I happen to have an Accuphase DP-560 (SA)CD player, and a Rossini with Rossini Clock. No Accuphase player has a clock input, so no clock synchronization possible this way. Best you can do is an S/PDIF cable between player and the Rossini. Clock mode: Audio on the DAC.
Thanks Paul. I’ve already done that. I could consider selling the Accuphase and replace it with an old Puccini or a cd transport with clock input. The alternative would be ripping all my cds and copy them onto my Roon Nucleus. On the other hand, given the current quality of music on Tidal/Qobuz the Roon, I’m listening to cds very seldom. So I’ll need to think about it.
Franco, you make a good point. Those who have been ripping bit perfect & storing all along have not had as steep a hill to climb in switching away from disc. But if one has a large library of discs, the time sink of getting them all reliably ripped and stored can be daunting. There are services that will do it for you, but that can add up.
As the quality of internet streaming has improved—and might continue to do so—it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone just getting started, or deciding to switch from discs, to resist the economic advantages of streaming subscriptions. Even though they may seem “expensive,” how many (even here) can afford to own all music they might enjoy? Let’s say Qobuz costs USD$200 annually (the average between their two high quality plans). Over twenty years, that’s $4k. Now, instead, if one bought two discs per month, even cheap ones at $12 and not MoFi or AP SACDs, that’s $5,760 over the same period, and you own 480 discs out of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pieces of music.
I may be missing something significant/obvious/trivial in all this, but to me, the benefits of subscription rental far outweigh permanent ownership. I say this as a guy who owns over 5TB of music and enjoys tinkering with the computer audio aspects of the hobby. There are other considerations:
Will Qobuz/Tidal survive? Who knows. Something with higher quality than current Spotify likely will.
Internet streaming requires decent bandwidth internet. Duh. That is likely only to get cheaper over time, but it can fail. If the internet is down, the hifi is quiet. One could Airplay from local storage on phone or tablet. Or one could still maintain local file storage of the discs one already owns.
One does lose out on the enjoyment of the physical media, whether LPs or compact disc jewel boxes (ugh). That’s a storage/organizational headache I do not miss. YMMV.
If one is willing to take the risk of internet outage, though, one could completely forego local storage and any costs and headaches associated with it. It’s an exceptionally simple model, and with dCS components, playable with exceptional accuracy and musicality. Getting that same mechanical, “clockable”accuracy out of silver discs I suspect is going to get increasingly more difficult/expensive.
Just some thoughts.
P.S. I agree with Chris. But the lawyer in me feels compelled to remind myself and others that, when you sell your CDs secondhand, you also sell your legal right to retain any ripped files. Ergo, subscription.
Your postscript has reignited my desire to know if those of us who have CDs that no longer work (some of which have been played ONCE and appear to be in perfect condition) can request a new, working version of those tunes for which we have a licence. I suspect there’s some asymmetry in the rights we’re talking about
No doubt! I’ve always been annoyed beyond description to pull out a CD that I might never have even played and discover that some or all of it is unplayable. Perfect Sound Forever®️ indeed!
Anyway, that’s why I rip discs the moment I receive them.
Yep. My problem is that my first rip might have been in a different format than I now want. (Not sure why I phrased that as a hypothetical…it’s happened more than once.)
Anyway, I’m dragging this off topic. Apologies, @Frankie67. Shutting up now! Will be interested to hear more feedback from others who can respond more helpfully than I can.
No problem at all Ben, it’s actually an interesting discussion and topic. As I said, I’m also personally wondering what to do. To add to the topic, what’s everyone’s thought on LPs vis-a-vis hi-res online streaming. This is also something that I’m considering as I own more than 600 albums.
I want to add further risks to your list a couple of post ago. Qobuz and Tidal may ( or may not) be with us for some time to come but that is no guarantee that the repertoire will be.
Even now there are labels that refuse streaming. They may be added to . Further some rights owners want to leverage exclusive play on a single streaming service from time to time which means removal of those titles from other services.
The payment structure of streaming services ( effectively allocating income by quantity of streams. ) does not provide sufficient economic security for specialist repertoire unless produced by one of the majors e.g. UMG, Warners, Sony where the cost can be written off against other mega money spinners.
Finally streaming services with huge repertoires are inefficient. Spotify revealed a few years ago that 80% of the titles on their servers were never accessed. So it only requires a bean counter to become CEO for a service to reduce costs by deleting them or any that have less than x% activity. That would probably mean deletion of <100% of the titles that I stream.
So I do not think that relying on streaming exclusively long term is a prudent thing to do. Stick with silver discs, rips or downloads for those recordings that mean a lot to you. One of the reasons that I invested in a Rossini transport last year.
As a copyright manager for most of my career I endorse your point about selling discs that have been ripped. So I do indeed have a storage problem .
On another topic your have raised I have never had a single silver disc fail except for one opera set which suffered from “bronzing”, a problem that became apparent during the early production days of CD and was a result of incomplete lacquer sealing and acid outgassing from the paper content of the CD booklet. Matters that have long been corrected. All, rare, occurrences of failure since have been due to surface contamination that was easily dealt with by washing the disc.
Excellent points Pete. It would be nice to think that streaming availability of music would only widen and improve, but there is zero assurance of that. If there is difficulty finding a track online today, there is no guarantee it will surface in the future.
Yes, and why I keep all my CDs in reasonably protective containers.
I agree it is rare, but I had three separate disc failures in the last three months alone that I purchased through Amazon, all new, none of them a CD-R. Amazon replaced all three, one of them three times before I gave up. Doesn’t happen often, but it’s physical media, and we live in an imperfect world.
I ripped thousands of CDs before selling it, it took me 2 years…It was a long time ago. At that time and say the 2 or 3 following years, I listened to my ripped CDs…And came Tidal…After some time I listened the new music on Tidal and “my” music on the NAS…but Now, with MQA and HiRes on Qobuz, most of the time I listened to “my” music in Hires on streaming services, my NAS is less and less in use…Sometimes I buy a nice vinyl, And I listen to it on my Linn LP12…but it is more nostalgia than anything else.
My NAS sounds better than CDs on Tidal and only MQA closes the gap so it’s minor. I still buy CDs and rip them; then they go on the shelf.
There is more up side to local and steamed content for a decent music server, which is something I am exploring at the moment. A friend recently trialled a Grimm MU1 and an Innuos Zenith and was impressed with the improvements.
I am still thinking about the route I will take, but I need a project, so likely to be a custom build at the moment.
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