Amazon launches lossless high-res music service!

[maty]

Are We Really Streaming “HD” Music?
http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6664

We should be thrilled to have uncompressed CD quality streams available. But we shouldn’t be paying more for it. The folks at Amazon — and Qobuz and others — are trying to repackage standard-resolution audio in bigger bit buckets and sell it to us a premium prices. It’s just the same old fidelity available in a new distribution paradigm. Stop pushing ridiculous numbers on us (768 kHz/32-bits!!) and focus on producing better sounding masters!

Let’s push for lossless CD quality streams and better sounding masters. Forget about MQA and any company — hardware or software — that tells you to get behind “hi-res” audio or music.

 

[StevenEleven]

To me he kind of missed the point for some of us—what I am thrilled to have is 44.1 / 16 compared to high bitrate lossy. What I want the full HD stream or file for is upmixing or other DSP that might give me different results due to differences in the lossy versus lossless files—differences I personally don’t think I can hear in unaltered 2-channel stereo. The additional value in that is worth the slight uptick in price from Amazon for me. And what’s good for them is it will pull more people into Prime and give them some breathing room for a while to become a major player in the streaming market.

I think as a market reality though Amazon had to package“Ultra HD” to deliver the knockout blow to the likes of Tidal and Qobuz—all the bennies (imagined or not) at a lower price and as far as Tidal is concerned, with no MQA. Amazon mass market name recognition at lower price and no MQA. CD quality streams unlike the better organized competitors—Youtube/Google, Apple, Spotify. So Amazon has landed quite a heavy blow to all of the big players and niche players, coming at the lossy and hi-res lossless services from different angles. Giving no slack. Very clever.

I’m a “give me 44.1 / 16 and I’m good to go” guy. Although I must admit it’s been *fun* playing around with “Ultra HD” streams, it’s not worth any extra money to me. It’s an interesting piece of tech though. What I’m paying a little extra for with Amazon is 44.1 / 16.

And I am hoping this process with Amazon will push much wider interest in improved remasterings possible with newer technology. If “Ultra HD” sparks demand for improved re-masters, all the better, it’s not all bad.

 

[amirm]

To me he kind of missed the point for some of us—what I am thrilled to have is 44.1 / 16 compared to high bitrate lossy.

Me too. I was fearful that all the little companies distributing CD and higher would go out of business and we would be stuck forever with formats that were worse than the CD.

 

[Midwest Blade]

16/44 is fine for me as well, I get Mark's point and I think it references the upward chase on ever increasing bit rates and programs like MQA. Qobuz and Tidal will have challenges to face with the juggernaut Amazon and I suspect thier headstart will quickly be overtaken.

 

[JoachimStrobel]

Let me go a little off topic: Streaming in CD red book quality is great and I might jump on that wagon. Streaming music without the album containing the track is a no no. Music is not about songs, but albums as the artists created it, at least for my taste. Amazon music is good as it has a good album view and at least gets the Cover right most of the time (I lost the covers often in ITunes). It does lack the notes, recording details or musicians involved. That is a crime that I have a hard time to participate. Let me hope for Cd Redbook with the CD booklet included in future.

Btw: Amazon includes a free rip with most purchased CDs. That was some MP3 flavor in the past. Has anybody found out if that is now a full CD copy? Will they upgrade the old rips?

 

[Ratatoskr]

The problem I have with Amazon Music HD is they have, intentionally or not, limited the ultimate sound quality in my opinion by just using Windows mixer and not enabling Wasapi exclusive mode as Tidal and Qobuz already have. We might see it in an update to the app, I suspect we won't, just like we won't ever see Roon and Audirvana integration. I don't think audio enthusiasts are really the target market for Amazon. My take is they are just trying to get a few more dollars a month from existing Prime subscribers and maybe sell some hardware they support; I could be wrong, time will tell.

 

[Cahudson42]

To me he kind of missed the point for some of us—what I am thrilled to have is 44.1 / 16 compared to high bitrate lossy. What I want the full HD stream or file for is upmixing or other DSP that might give me different results due to differences in the lossy versus lossless files—differences I personally don’t think I can hear in unaltered 2-channel stereo. The additional value in that is worth the slight uptick in price from Amazon for me. And what’s good for them is it will pull more people into Prime and give them some breathing room for a while to become a major player in the streaming market.

I think as a market reality though Amazon had to package“Ultra HD” to deliver the knockout blow to the likes of Tidal and Qobuz—all the bennies (imagined or not) at a lower price and as far as Tidal is concerned, with no MQA. Amazon mass market name recognition at lower price and no MQA. CD quality streams unlike the better organized competitors—Youtube/Google, Apple, Spotify. So Amazon has landed quite a heavy blow to all of the big players and niche players, coming at the lossy and hi-res lossless services from different angles. Giving no slack. Very clever.

I’m a “give me 44.1 / 16 and I’m good to go” guy. Although I must admit it’s been *fun* playing around with “Ultra HD” streams, it’s not worth any extra money to me. It’s an interesting piece of tech though. What I’m paying a little extra for with Amazon is 44.1 / 16.

And I am hoping this process with Amazon will push much wider interest in improved remasterings possible with newer technology. If “Ultra HD” sparks demand for improved re-masters, all the better, it’s not all bad.

And with Fire 7s cheap enough, we can have several - one driving our main system, casted to by our phone...so - no more BlueTooth! Hooray!

 

[phrosty]

I noticed playing a UHD-capable file at a lower quality will pop up this. Seems to indicate it won't do anything to get bit-perfect playback.

 

[mkawa]

The problem I have with Amazon Music HD is they have, intentionally or not, limited the ultimate sound quality in my opinion by just using Windows mixer and not enabling Wasapi exclusive mode as Tidal and Qobuz already have. We might see it in an update to the app, I suspect we won't, just like we won't ever see Roon and Audirvana integration. I don't think audio enthusiasts are really the target market for Amazon. My take is they are just trying to get a few more dollars a month from existing Prime subscribers and maybe sell some hardware they support; I could be wrong, time will tell.

we should also figure out how to register feature requests. i can actually look into this. i still know some folks who know some folks at amzn in the digital org (i think?)

 

[Bamyasi]

@Bamyasi and anyone:
I notice when I use casting from my phone to control Amazon Music on the F 7, the F7 changes to a simplified display, and the streaming quality is no longer available from Amazon Music at either the F7 or my phone.

What you see on your F7 in this case is Alexa music playback interface and not the Amazon Music app. Amazon Music service uses Alexa as its streaming & control protocol. Unfortunately, F7 does not work as full Alexa-enabled device, so you cannot use Alexa on your phone to ask Alexa on your F7 to play a playlist on Spotify. But at least it works with the Amazon Music app streaming to F7 (via Alexa).

Question is, is the streaming quality on the F7 player exactly the same when playing natively on it, or via casting from another device? My DAC (the $9 Apple dongle) has no display - so I can't tell. Perhaps someone with a DAC display can advise..
10/2 edit: I got myself a D10 to substitute for the Apple dongle for desktop use. When casting and controlling the F7 from my Moto g6, the D10 display continues to show the same 44.1. So casting apparently does not effect F7 playback. The Moto g6 also allows me to control the volume, as well as track selection, pause, etc. Neat. And with the D10 rather than the Apple driving my Liquid Spark, there is now plenty of 'juice' to drive my HE400i with tons of headroom..

BTW, while the Apple works fine with the simple non-powered OTG cable, the D 10 does not. It operated erratically kicking in and out seemingly randomly - until I switched to a powered OTG cable. Now it's solid.

Regarding streaming quality and bitrates, it's hard to know for certain but I have described my understanding of how it works in my previous post.

I have also done some more testing over the weekend and the results sort of corroborate my hypothesis.

Amazon Music app is a mess, especially in terms of its GUI and user controls. It tends to report tracks quality rather randomly and I would not trust the "HD" and "Ultra HD" icons displayed in its various places very much. Sometimes, you can have all three variants shown at the same time for the same track, e.g. "Ultra HD" on the album / playback queue tab, "HD" on the now playing tab, and "Standard" when you click on the HD icon. It all changes dynamically with no apparent connection to the actual quality of the music playback. The latter by the way, seems to work in a much more reliable way, so I assume this is more of a flaky GUI and/or control protocol implementation in the app, while the streaming protocol itself is more robust in my experience.

So instead of trying to figure out what those "Ultra HD" and "HD" icons mean, I tried to meter the actual network connections on my wireless router, to see if they are consistent with CD-quality and Hi-Res bitrates (or not). I have old Linksys router with no fancy admin GUI and it does not provide continuous bandwidth monitoring. Instead, you click on the monitoring button, it samples the traffic for about 10 seconds and then prints out speed estimates for each device connected in Mbps. So there is no way to meter single track as a whole and then calculate exact bitrate. And Mbps values are printed out up to two decimal places, so rounding errors are large for lower bitrates. Also, caching and buffering algorithms used by the streaming server and by the client makes the task even harder. I had to spend a lot of time repeatedly sampling the same tracks to get reproducible results. Even then, the results I've got are approximate and should be taken with a grain of salt. I invite users with more sophisticated routers equipped with full scale monitoring facilities to follow up and publish their own results.

What I have measured so far:

• Pandora streaming via Chromecast Audio shows network connection speeds ca. 60 Kbps.

This one was used as a low bitrate control. Results are consistent with the 64 Kbps AAC+ codec they claim to be using on all mobile devices. You won't believe it but Pandora still call it Standard Quality and there is also Low Quality available, which uses 32 Kbps streams. I have Pandora Premium and as a Premium subscriber I can switch to High Quality (192 Kbps) on my phones and tablets but there is no way to do that for other network devices, like CCA.

• Amazon Music app on Android phone streaming via Chromecast Audio measures around 310-320 Kbps.

This is consistent with the Amazon Standard quality streaming, officially @ 320 Kbps MP3's. Listening test also confirms much higher quality compared to Pandora. In fact, I had really hard time when trying to tell Amazon Standard streaming from Amazon HD.

• Amazon Music app on Android phone streaming via Alexa to Amazon F7 tablet: HD tracks (16/44.1) measured anywhere between 1.2 Mbps and 2.5 Mbps. No Ultra HD support is available when streaming to Alexa devices (at least not on F7).

Amazon Music app running on F7 tablet connected to USB DAC produced the same numbers as above. Makes sense since, for some reason, directly attached USB DACs seem to cause all audio playback bitrates to be limited by 16/44.1 on F7. At least F7 does not try to resample everything to 24/192, as my Google Nexus 7 tablet does in the same configuration.

• Amazon Music app running directly on F7 and playing back via F7 built in audio stack & speakers measured ca. 6.0-7.5 Mbps for Ultra HD tracks (24/96). Ironically, it looks like Amazon in fact does stream in full Hi-Res to this puny little guy (and to nothing else).

I haven't tried measuring any 24/192 tracks yet.

FYI: I found the following article from Qobuz Magazine useful, it includes various Hi-Res bitrate estimate comparisons.

 

[Cahudson42]

Great info @Bamyasi - Thanks!

Now you have me thinking - how good is the DAC in my F7? Say compared to my F7 USB connected D10? D10 feeds Liquid Spark, Hi400i - and to me, sounds great at 16/44.1. But would it be just as good on HD, and maybe better for UHD, to bypass the D10 and feed the F7 3.5mm direct to the LS???

Need to do some comparisons

Edit: FWIW, D10 displays 44.1 on everything HD and UHD I've played over the F7. Never higher.

 

[Bamyasi]

Great info @Bamyasi - Thanks!

Now you have me thinking - how good is the DAC in my F7? Say compared to my F7 USB connected D10? D10 feeds Liquid Spark, Hi400i - and to me, sounds great at 16/44.1. But would it be just as good on HD, and maybe better for UHD, to bypass the D10 and feed the F7 3.5mm direct to the LS???

Need to do some comparisons

Edit: FWIW, D10 displays 44.1 on everything HD and UHD I've played over the F7. Never higher.

You are welcome. Frankly, I am not a big fan of the recent Hi-Res audio craze and I do not believe you can actually hear the difference compared to CD quality. I can understand a warm and fuzzy feeling one would have from actually owning all those Hi-Res FLAC files presumably matching studio masters in quality but it does not make any sense with streaming since you no longer own anything and cannot even tell the difference, so what's the point? I would rather go for external DAC attached to USB. This saves you some Internet traffic (pretty substantial amount actually) and maybe even preserves some amount of fossil carbon in the process. I am not sure about the latter though.

My DAC would always display 16/44.1 when connected to F7 too. Actually, if you carefully read the Amazon web site, it states F7 supports HD streaming, but not Ultra HD. I guess external DAC playback counts as streaming too.

Note, even compressed lossy stream (MP3, AAC, etc) is decoded to same 16/44.1 PCM format prior to feeding it to USB audio driver and then further down the drain to your DAC. Frequency numbers shown by DAC are not very informative, hence my exercise in network metering.

 

[Grattle]

The iPhone app crashes on me several times a day. It’s also a pretty bad UI.

All fixable though, so I’ll see if they get it all working better. If not, I’m out.

 

[Ratatoskr]

I can't speak to macOS or iOS since I don't own any Apple products right now but the Amazon Music HD app for Windows 10 seems like it was rushed to market and needs attention. Up and down sampling is taking place in shared mode, you can not trust what the app tells you when you click on the "HD" badge displayed for a track. The resampling appears to be taking place in the Windows OS rather than the Amazon Music HD app. The Amazon Music HD app is also using 5% - 20% CPU at times.

There do appear to be some native 192 files on Amazon Music HD but when I play them they are down sampled to 24/96 I have user set in Windows mixer. This is according to the display on my external DAC. Just the same, 44 files are upsampled to 96. Amazon Music HD could fix this by enabling Wasapi exclusive mode for Windows or hog and integer mode in macOS.

On the other hand the Amazon Music HD developers may see nothing wrong with resampling and we are stuck with what they want to give us if/until they license their API to third party players like Audirvana and Roon which do bit perfect playback right.

 

[JoachimStrobel]

I tried this today. I buy most of my CD via Amazon. When I play the Autorips that I received with the album (still in the Amazon cloud), the Album is marked HD, but the songs play non-HD. Only when I click “Unlimited” and re-play do they play in HD. This is on Windows 10.
I can not find any multichannel music. The Atmos titles shown during the EchoStudio Demo seem not to be available (yet). Otherwise it is cool, all CDs are in RedBook quality. On the IPad I can search for music in the Amazon app and then click on “stream with Amazon Music”, like that I can at least see the front and back of the Album cover.

 

[openvista]

If I embark on a long listening session using the Amazon Music app on my iPhone 8, inevitably, I will end up reaching a point where songs are served in "Standard" quality. If I restart the song, I get HD or UHD quality. However, the next song will be served in "Standard" unless, again, I restart the song. I have a solid 100 Mbps internet connection, and I never experience downgrade issues on Tidal or any other streaming service (Netflix, Prime Video, etc).

 

[digititus]

Seems like Amazon are not allowing HD music content to play in Linux (via the web player). Same issue with HD video content. Yet, all browsers are using the same DRM engine on all Operating Systems via Chrome.

 

[somebodyelse]

Seems like Amazon are not allowing HD music content to play in Linux (via the web player). Same issue with HD video content. Yet, all browsers are using the same DRM engine on all Operating Systems via Chrome.

Sounds plausible given the recent experience with Disney+ - do you have a source or evidence for Amazon doing this for music? The DRM engine is the same, but it has 3 levels. Linux (and many android devices, chromebooks, and older Windows versions) only get the lowest Level 3 which is essentially that the DRM engine is present. Level 2 requires hardware support, and Level 1 needs certification from Google. They don't charge for certification, but the process costs the manufacturer time, which is why some Android device manufacturers don't bother. A quick search on 'widevine level 1' will turn up a lot of sources about this.

 

[digititus]

Sounds plausible given the recent experience with Disney+ - do you have a source or evidence for Amazon doing this for music? The DRM engine is the same, but it has 3 levels. Linux (and many android devices, chromebooks, and older Windows versions) only get the lowest Level 3 which is essentially that the DRM engine is present. Level 2 requires hardware support, and Level 1 needs certification from Google. They don't charge for certification, but the process costs the manufacturer time, which is why some Android device manufacturers don't bother. A quick search on 'widevine level 1' will turn up a lot of sources about this.

I see in the settings of the web player (chrome) that there is no HD (greyed out). However, on digging further it seems that no web player on any OS supports the HD file playback. For that, you need to download the amazon app (which of course doesn't exist on Linux). I can use on Android, but would prefer to have High Res no just for headphones. Will continue to evaluate, but doubtful I will subscribe after 90 days.

 

[MRphotography]

The power of Amazon HD is that it can stream digitally to my DAC from my FireTV. And I can call up the song I want with my voice. Hopefully they will do it so that I can use my echo dot to play the music on my firetv like I do tv shows.

what Dac are you using to do this? I am trying to find a great solution for streaming my amazon ultra HD music through my older denim receiver....