Mr. Obvious (?) - digital source (burn)

Transports can but do not always affect sound quality. 

No need to go to server unless you hate playing cds but like ripping them. 

Streaming is the direction music distribution is heading.  It has the advantage of giving you access to a lot of music, but you don't own it.  I expect monthly fees to rise once they have a good hold on the market.

Um, one major variable is whether you are using a lossy or lossless format.

Losless formats like ALAC, FLAC, WAV, should produce a bit-identical replay to the CD they were ripped from. MP3, Ogg, and others do not. There is some argument as to whether WAV on some streamers sounds better due to how they handle the decompression of ALAC or FLAC files. Again, ALAC and FLAC are lossless, but compressed.

MP3, Ogg are lossy and compressed. You cannot reconstruct a perfect copy from them.

Streaming services vary quite a bit, with Tidal being one of the few offering CD quality.

Hard drives crash and die! You better have at least two storing your data. Otherwise, goodbye music collection! That's why I will stick with my collection of CD players!

 I've been slowly copying my CD collection to a dedicated hard drive on my network. It's more for convenience sake than sound quality. It's much easier to scroll through a list on the screen of my phone or tablet than dig through piles of discs. I rip to flac and the sound quality is great.

I use a free sync program to automatically copy the files to another drive every night and also back them up in the cloud.

Gents - thanks for the input.  Doubt I’ll ever go to streaming and pay a monthly fee for what I own.... worth it for the 20’s crowd though.   On hard drives, yes I have my old Mac backed up on an external Iomega drive.   On the FLAC file angle of being lossless but compressed for efficient space use - I would think the latter is no issue for a great DAC (as I believe the Oppo is).   Last, I’ll still await an opinion on my statements on the “source” burn-in issue.   After all those years of the hi-end flowery prose of “removing the vails to better resolution”, I’d like to focus on the science side, per se.    Steve W.

A dac has to decode the values of the data stream AND the clock signal "built-in" in the signal. The source has to send both. Some dacs are sensitive to timing errors and is therefor sensitive to which transport or source that is used. Others dacs are not sensitive at all (may use large buffers and re-clock the signal) and are then insensitive to different sources. 

@roberjeman  Hard drives crash and die!

This is a true statement; however, it's easy to protect yourself.  I've ripped my CD collection to a Zenith MKII; it also holds any music I purchase and download (FLAC and DSD files).  It has a 2TB SSD. 

I run backups to my Synology NAS, which has two mirrored 3TB drives. These drives are hot-swappable, so I don't worry about loosing one.  Loosing both would be a problem but not catastrophic because I backup one to an external USB drive about once a month.   

It's much more convenient listening to my ripped CD collection than spinning disks, and I don't have to load/unload the CD player.  I also think my ripped CDs sound better than playing them through my McIntosh MCD7008.  Tidal HiRes music and Zenith ripped CDs sound about the same to me.  Tidal Masters sound better.

I have about 16000 digital music files that will last me a couple of lifetimes, but Tidal has even more :-).  I've discovered new artists and songs (old school R&B, jazz, soft rock, & blues).  I have many vinyl albums that Tidal does not have and probably never will.  IMHO streaming is definitely here to stay.

oldschool1948 - your post brings up a great point.  I went to the ZENith site and read the profile and specs.  It streams, and serves as a rip-CD-to-hard-drive unit.  For streaming, it goes up to 32 bit and mentions ultra low noise output, but with no specs.   On the home server side I go back to my key question.  Isn’t there zero difference where the source of the coded music (bits) are stored, including the humble silver disc?  Your ZENith costs several thousand, but one still needs a great external DAC with it for the ripped/stored content (correct?).   My Oppo BDP-103 uses the Cirrus Logic CS4382A chip, which has an S/N ratio of over 115dB and THD+N of under .006%.

headphonedreams - just remembered a key point on bit decoding.  I’ve had the Bursting Out disc from J. Tull for a year.  Even the remaster was far too bright.  I burned a new copy on my old IMac here, and the high brightness was clipped out, per se.   HOW can it be that my OPPO DAC is reading these 2 sources differently..... the original disc burned in at the factory, and mine burned on my Mac?  Does not make scientific sense that the sound should vary significantly between 2 “burner” sources?  Anyone on this...  bigguy

Also reports of hard drives damaging data when consolidating files. I would suggest a drive use only and excursively for audio data which you never set to cleaning up deleted files! Let it alone.When you backup data that is will keep the dead files out of the backup drive...I do not use such files. but from what I have read, seems like a good idea to not clean up hard drives full of music data.