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As I start another night of Qobuz listening I realize what the problem is with streaming. There is just too much music to listen to. I probably won't repeat any of tonight's listening whereas I find real pleasure going back through my collection multiple times, finding new pleasure in the familiar. So I play my collection during the day and stream at night. It's one of the joys of being retired.

I won't comment too much about the NAS / Raid discussion other than to say make sure you have a copy offsite and I mean well offsite. Since my collection is only 500 gb I gave copies to my daughter, nieces and friends in the hope that they listen to it. If our house burns down and my copies at home are destroyed, then hopefully one of them kept it in some dark dusty corner.

ray

Paul,

I hear you. I am researching streaming service, but have a pretty substantial collection (probably close to 3500 CDs, which over 2000 are already ripped in lossless FLAC. Some of them are a couple or three decades old and some may be a little obscure to show up (i.e., I had to index them myself). I am wondering whether it is worth ripping the rest of my collection. But I also want to get use of what I have.

My biggest question is which streaming service to get for Classical music, and which has the best sound. I suspect I would be more interested in Qobuz over Tidal, and Amazon seems to be pretty hard to get working unless you are driving it with a Mac or Windows box.

Also need to figure out what setup I need on both a backend and renderer for a streaming service.

So much to learn.

David

David, I know that you asked Paul the question but as a rabid classical music fan, here is my advice.

The quality of reproduction is not the deciding factor, it's the quality and interest of the performance in classical music which is important. There are any number of recordings of the famous classical pieces and often the best or most interesting performances are terribly recorded. I will give you an example of William Kapell playing Chopin's 2nd piano sonata in the Geelong Town Hall in 1953. It was fortunately recorded on acetate and the sound quality is extremely poor but you forget that as you listen to this inspired performance. The Funeral March 2nd movement is especially powerful when you realize the pianist died in a plane crash a few days later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi5onHLdV1I

What you need is a guide and one of the best is a subscription to the Gramophone magazine. Each month they review recent releases and you can build up your playlist for the month as you go through the reviews. As you listen you can read the review again and learn from what you are hearing compared to what the reviewer is writing. You may disagree profoundly as I am doing now listening to some Schumann conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. He is a conductor I normally enjoy but this was woeful. The reviewer liked the performance.

I don't have much experience with the other streaming services but Qobuz has most of what I want to listen to and the search mechanism is good.

ray

David, I just realized that you will hopefully be showing your Elsinore speakers in the near future. In preparation for our move to Austalia later this year, I will be getting rid of my collection of Gramophone magazines. If you wish you can have them. It will just be a few dozen of them.

ray

If only everything I wanted to listen to was online--and if only I could be assured that it would STAY online. There's simply no guarantee of that, I'm afraid.

I have over 10tb of music files on the NAS being part of David Raden’s gang. So I have a backup here and then there is Dave the source in Alexandria as the ultimate backup. About 500 CD’s on the collection are mine. But finding them can be troublesome. I’ll sort by artist and pick one I recognize and hit play. I also spend a lot of time listening to ABC Jazz out of Australia. They speak about 5 words an hour, very good.
I do not look at music intellectually, only to listen and get pleasure. Steaming seems to work for me.

Well, I just signed up with QoBuz this afternoon. Listening through Volumio on my RPI3B/Allo Digione. It works, and will have to do alot of listening over the next few days.

David

The British audio press all like Quboz always gets high marks. I wish I could afford it

192/24 is streaming glitch-free. Sounding great! Listening to the Pavel Haas Quartet playing Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8. Marvelous performance and recording!

Great, congrats!