I do like to own things, rather than lease/hire them I guess, but the streaming services do now have me hooked. The A/V services are much cheaper than what I used to spend on purchasing vinyl, CD’s and VHS/DVD’s/Blu-Ray’s etc; by a long chalk.

I too use the locally stored library less and less, but I suspect that I’m slightly bothered by the thought that the prices of the streaming services will clearly continue to rise and stepping off the merry-go-round leaves me with very little… er ..nothing… Also sometimes the services can (occasionally) be unavailable. I like to have more than one stream available too from different sources as a backup.

Each decade costs me in the region of £15,000 to £20,000 (on average) and that’s not including any of the hardware to play the A/V sources and so I think it’s nice to look back and have something to show for the money spent.

Admittedly I’ve not brought any albums in the past few years. It’s all now leased, but I’m still reluctant to give up the things I not only once bought, but also spent many hours ‘ripping’ and ‘tagging’ to get them as I wanted them and it’s nice to have all available as a thing to ‘fall back’ on too.

Technically you don’t own the content on the CD in the traditional sense; for instance if you rip them to a NAS, and then even gift them away, the playing of their music by you on your NAS is illegal. Or perhaps it is illegal to gift them away? I am not sure, but I know that this is a tricky issue.

In practice, this fine distinction may not matter, but the digital age is going to throw up many things that haven't been thought through yet by all participants, I suspect.

Some research turned up this, as to how two legal actions, when done together, become illegal.

It is legal beyond argument to sell or gift a music CD, after one has enjoyed the music fully and does not want to listen to it anymore. Or for any other reason.

While the law isn’t really there on the ripping actions, RIAA has said that as long as the rips are used for just the listening of the one that bought the CD as new, they will not take any actions against the ripping making it de facto a legal action.

But a combination of the two legal actions above is illegal.

As far as purchased downloads are concerned, by hitting the I agree button needed to be hit before the download is sold, one has agreed to getting just a license to listen to the download for personal enjoyment. And presumably that of friends, in one’s presence. But not of customers in a commercial space. A separate fee is needed for that. I don’t know what happens if one plays a CD in a commercial space for enjoyment of patrons!

I put most of my stuff on the NAS before I started streaming, see no reason to trim it down now. Adding new stuff I buy only takes a few minutes. Have to rip it and crunch to MP3 so I can play it in the car anyway.

Having my music available when I want it is a big plus, no problems like folks are reporting on streaming services, no problem if the Internet goes down for a few hours. Cost to keep the Pi based NAS running is pennies.

So all the new stuff you listen to, you buy either as a CD or as a digital download?

In my case, I have come to know and like a totally new to me genre of music - blues - in just the last three years - without buying any of it. All my CDs were largely jazz and Indian classical. Now, I listen to all three genres depending on my mood and the time of the day. Streaming services have proved to be a boon, and in India they are priced to what the market will pay, about USD 2 a month. So, I can even afford to have two subs running and still come out way way ahead on what I would have spend to pick up five hundred or so blues CDs. Which are still sold for anywhere between USD 5 to 8.

The car/travel needs are fully served by downloading playlists of all three genres from either service, stored on the phone for offline listening. The phone can, in emergencies, also be connected to Sonos line in jacks at home to serve when the net goes down, which is happening now in rare cases.

The main downside to using a NAS is the Sonos limits, which mean swapping music in and out just to get it to ‘fit’. At one stage I thought that the 1Gb storage that I bought in 2010 may be the limiting factor, but it turned out to be Sonos kit after all. Casting via Chromecast solves the limit issue, but seems to run the phone battery down quicker than the Sonos app.

I have tried a couple of steaming services, and while they may be good for more popular music, they weren’t good on classical - they may have the piece, but not the performance.

It has been very useful to keep streaming even when the internet connection is down - I feel that we’re all becoming rather too dependent on the availability of the cloud.

I used to buy CDs at full price to rip, but now most of mine are bought from charity shops - so I’m glad that other people are giving CDs up - more for me When you consider that they can cost 10p per CD, it’s quite cheap to try out different music.

The main benefit to me of still having a CD player linked into my ZP90 is when other people come round and bring CDs with them - the assumption is still that I’ll have a working player, although I could use one of the other players (blu-ray, recordable DVD,  HD-DVD) if needed. The 26 year old CD player still sounds the best, though.

That is surprising; I would expect it to sound at best the same as the same CD ripped losslessly and played by Sonos from a NAS that has the ripped file. At best only because the ADC additional step in a CDP wired to line in, should, in theory, downgrade the quality although I doubt that is audible in real world use.

The best of the CD capable players - the DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD players don’t seem to play music as well as the old CD specific player. These ‘tests’ were done outside of Sonos, when they were all wired into the AV receiver.

Got it; perhaps the differences arise from better engineered transports. Electronics downstream of those should be functionally identical.