Spotify or Pandora

Jond,
The extent to which Flac can compress does depend a lot on the type of music and the recording. The BBC broadcast was classical music (the Proms) with a great dynamic range. That allows far more compression than pop music mastered loudly.
Are you sure you can still distinguish if you do the comparison double blind? Try one of those websites with streams at different bitrates that you cannot know when you listen. The statistics show that people score not or hardly better than random when trying to identify 320 kbs from full redbook CD. You may have better hearing than that, but to be sure the test has to be double blind.

+1 Jond

+1 willemj

I prefer Spotify because it is totally free and I can also use a great Spotify album downloader for Mac to help me extract all the songs for free listening offline.  https://www.drmare.com/spotify-music-converter-for-mac/

Just went on Tidal web site.  OK, ... so walk me through how I get the Tidal music into my linestage.  I do not have a DAC, other than what is in my PC.  So the music signal from the PC to the linestage has to be in analogue format.

So, how do I connect my PC to my linestage in analogue mode.  Is there a UBC jack to SE or XLR/BAL type connector cord to make the connection?  Is the UBC jack a digital output? If so, would I have to use the headphone output jack of my PC??  But how do I connect that to the input jacks of my linestage (SE or XLR/BAL)??

Also, is the DAC in my PC inferior to a separate stand-alone DAC unit? If so, how much SQ  would I lose by not having a dedicated DAC?

I am a older member of the baby boomer generation.  So this is all new to me.

Thanks.