I’m just going to say that unless you have access to a lot of CDs for free, you are likely going to spend more money on building a FLAC library than moving up to the HiFi Plus plan. If you figure you are paying $5 per CD, plus additional storage for all the files, and potentially additional equipment for networking, the math of saving money through flac files really isn’t there in my opinion.

Yes, there are ways to do flac files for less. But if you’re building a collection of music you WANT vs music you can just find cheap, streaming is the way to go.

Obviously it’s more like this:

100% speakers
100% preamp/source/amp
100% cables, stereo bench, acoustics, etc

When I’m serious considering a new piece of equipment, I keep a couple reference tracks that I know are objectively poor recordings of music I love. If the system just brings out all the flaws and none of the musicality, the it’s not for me.