Interesting conversation. I went fully digital around 12 years ago and disposed of all my CDs after ripping them. I discovered quad and became curious around two years later and started amassing decoded files for future use, but wasn't able to listen to them until five years ago with the purchase of a £30 Raspberry Pi, an Onkyo receiver and a server on which I store all the files.
Are you saying you can run a Pi into an Onkyo via HDMI and experience multichannel goodness without dropouts or other weirdness? I'm curious because I have two different Onkyo receivers and neither work reliably with ANY model of Pi. Given other HDMI issues with Onkyo, I've just always assumed there's some weird HDMI incompatibility.
I simply cannot fathom why anyone would put themselves through the hassle using a disc for digital music.
I largely agree, but streaming is one of those things I just flat-out didn't really get until I actually tried it. After I'd played around with it for a while, it made sense--in fact, I now consider it an essential part of my
life--but prior to that as an abstract concept it frankly had very little appeal.
The other catch is that it's an enormous commitment for those of us with large collections. Once I decided to go all the way with it, it took me
18 months to get everything done. For me, things can quickly escalate from "This is interesting" to "This is what I want to do all the time now and there is nothing else that matters, go away!" but I can easily understand how normal people with actual lives would look at a project like that and view it as insurmountable.
Also, I think a lot of people tend to be happy to ignore stuff they bought years ago and haven't played in a long time, but having the albums that became obscure magically at my fingertips going forward was a big part of the appeal for me.
Now that I finally have reliable options for playing back streaming video, it would be nice to have all that online as well, but even ignoring the necessary time investment, the storage demands make it completely impractical with current technology.