photonman

Okay, its been over a month since the announcement! Still waiting (I know later this year) but I have been playing Spotify almost 7/24 with the hopes their AI will say "send this Spotifyle the invite to Hi Fi".

Someone has been watching "Outlander" on Netflix too much!

I think $14.99 USD is what I am expecting to pay. Anything more and I will be annoyed and anything less I will be ecstatic. While stay-at-home is in effect, the Connect feature is very convenient to switch between office and living room. Add in CD quality and WHAM! this is a dream come true for us spotters! One of the biggest questions I have been reading about is how much of the Spotify song catalog will be available in lossless. Since most of the songs are already distributed to other services in lossless, there should be pretty good coverage.

In that case, I change my bet to $13.99 / month as most Spotify users would not care about anything more than CD quality and 24/192 is more marketing than audible reality. The Spotify playlist algorithms, Connect functionality and UI blows away all others. But there is definitely target segments that care about playlists versus 24/192 and it is great to have choices :)

No way Spotify will get into a pricing war with a technology behemoth such as Amazon but I would bet they undercut the other competitors. My bet is $15.99 USD

We can probably thank Amazon for spurring Spotify's reaction. Now Amazon has nothing special to offer.

I have been anxiously waiting for this reality. I stayed with Spotify because of their superior interface, dynamic content delivery (AI) and their connect and this is the icing! Now I am curious to know the pricing which I would bet has to be cheaper than Tidal but more than Amazon HD maybe?

So are we talking movies with great soundtracks? If so, here are a few of mine (yes I am stuck in the 80's) 1. Opening scene of Top Gun (this soundtrack had them all: Madonna, Kenny Loggins, Berlin etc.) 2. Vision Quest final jump rope scene (another great 80's soundtrack for the ultimate coming of age movie)

The cabinet is beautiful! I like antique furniture. Who is the manufacturer?

It is rare but DNS can fail so even with an internet connection you would experience your "outage". Cloudflare had a major outage mid-2020 if I recall. I use OpenDNS (now Cisco Umbrella) and Google name servers at home and OpenDNS only for the enterprise at work.

If by rare you mean old :) yes I do, it is a mid 2014 Macbook Pro running Big Sur. It still seems like I bought it new yesterday. Mac's can run forever.

I have switched back and forth between my optical and USB and can say that when streaming from my Macbook, the optical is much better than the USB. I agree with the "veiled" observation. However, streaming from a more audio specific device may sound better through the USB than optical.

There is a thread over at audiogon that talks about the LA4/HPA4 specifically. Doing the volume control in the analog domain is the main benefit allowing the full digital signal to the DA process or something like that as I don't understand all the EE stuff but the result is much more precise volume control and better sound at lower volumes.

Here is my Journey to the full Benchmark stack of three which happened over a two year span. Chord Qutest to Pass XA30 class A Chord Qutest to Nord MK500 II class D Benchmark Dac3 to Nord MK500 II Benchmark Dac3 to Benchmark AHB2 class G Benchmark Dac3 to Benchmark LA4 to Benchmark AHB2 Each step of the way I just kept wondering how much better it could get and I am happy to finally say this is my end point for many years to come. The Benchmark stuff is dead quiet and very detailed if you like that sound. The entire stack was less then $8K and has

Does your Rega and PC have optical input and output, respectively. I have found optical out of a PC to a DAC beats USB out of a PC. It was pretty obvious and I never would have believed it so give that a try first.