Sitting back in your favourite armchair browsing your entire digital music collection, searching by album, artist, track and even genre, and an improvement in sound quality!

As the fastest changing area of the marketplace we encourage you to aim to future proof to an extent when choosing your system but equally settle for a system that provides sound quality as much as features.

At the most straightforward of levels – connect your Mac, PC or Laptop to one of the many DACs on the market and using iTunes, Pure Music, Windows Music Player or one of the other music management programs to manage the storage and replay of your music.

Until recently, streamed music usually meant a compromise in quality, however with music stored in a lossless format (FLAC, ALAC or WMA) many of these computer based systems now outperform their disc spinning counterparts.

Many labels are now releasing for download, albums and tracks in high resolution format (24/96 or even 24/192 as opposed to CD’s 16/44), these represent dramatic improvements over standard CD and cover a huge variety of genres. However the base standard for any good music streaming service is equivalent to that of CD and for many that is already a huge step on from listening to low bit rate MP3

Via the use of Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives or even better a dedicated music server, huge amounts of music can be stored easily and safely on a device no bigger than a shoe box and accessed by any music player attached to your home data network either wirelessly or wired.

Subscription based music library services such as Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, Deezer and Napster are also available, offering real time access to over 30 million tracks.

Most streaming products no longer require you to have a computer in your listening room, these music streamers act like any other source component and can be plugged directly into an existing amplifier. These are then usually controlled from a handheld device such as smartphone or tablet. Normally Android or iOS based.