Amazon Music appalling sound quality

[litemotiv]

exactly what i meant (sterile), it sounds somehow too clean, as if it was AI upscaled.

There is no reason for Amazon to mess with the sound, there are several reasons for this.

First the sound could only be altered by processing the actual source files, since the streams themselves are application agnostic. The entire catalog is owned and managed by the rights holders, being the record labels and/or artists. The rights holders would never allow a third party, in this case Amazon, to mess with their property and potentially degrade the sound quality. It would be a legal minefield for Amazon to engage in any type of processing, there is no reason why they would want to alter incredibly well known material from e.g. The Beatles, Michael Jackson or other iconic artists, there is nothing to gain for them by doing that.

Second it would take an enormous amount of recurring processing for no benefit. There are 75+ million tracks on Amazon, many thousands more are uploaded every day, and constantly processing all this material would be very costly. Ofcourse Amazon has the processing power to do this, but economically they have no incentive to do so. Storage is cheap but CPU cycles are not.

Amazon Music is a streaming network, they are not in the business of remastering or post-processing material that was already painstakingly prepared by the rights holders themselves. They will very gladly not touch the material in any way, because only then can they not be held accountable for the quality of the tracks. They can just point to the labels/artists for anything related to sound quality, which is the best position for them to be in.

(the same applies to all the other streaming platforms ofcourse)

 

[Schlippwhip68]

Just wondering if any other Amazon Music users are finding that the sound quality seems to be atrocious and getting worse? It sounds like a very low bitrate MP3, made with an ancient codec... I'm sure it didn't used to be this bad.

Its now 2022 and I am using the Amazon app on an high end Windows 10 pc with Ultra HD Chill collection coming through a very decent set up and it still pales in comparison to iTunes on the same computer and rig. The advantage that iTunes affords is the manual EQ that in all honesty without it iTunes would probably not be my streaming platform choice but it does have it and it is very good. If or when Amazon and the current app devs that Mr Big Dollar currently employs pull their fingers out of the cream cake and put the coffee down and just have a little shootout with iTunes the might realize they have some work to do and stop wasting time and money on trying to solder diamonds onto a tin ring! At the very least an additional EQ on their windows app that offers manual configuration would be a huge improvement to say the least.
The supposed HD and Ultra HD currently sounds trodden on, muddy, constipated and just lame. Let me put it another way, Amazon music app is worse than Chord C-line while iTunes is most definably Chord Clearway....even with generic cables. This is not to Troll Amazon or berate thier devs but im afraid it just leaves a heck of alot to be desired for the money currently in 2022.

 

[antcollinet]

Its now 2022 and I am using the Amazon app on an high end Windows 10 pc with Ultra HD Chill collection coming through a very decent set up and it still pales in comparison to iTunes on the same computer and rig. The advantage that iTunes affords is the manual EQ that in all honesty without it iTunes would probably not be my streaming platform choice but it does have it and it is very good. If or when Amazon and the current app devs that Mr Big Dollar currently employs pull their fingers out of the cream cake and put the coffee down and just have a little shootout with iTunes the might realize they have some work to do and stop wasting time and money on trying to solder diamonds onto a tin ring! At the very least an additional EQ on their windows app that offers manual configuration would be a huge improvement to say the least.
The supposed HD and Ultra HD currently sounds trodden on, muddy, constipated and just lame. Let me put it another way, Amazon music app is worse than Chord C-line while iTunes is most definably Chord Clearway....even with generic cables. This is not to Troll Amazon or berate thier devs but im afraid it just leaves a heck of alot to be desired for the money currently in 2022.

It sounds fine to me on a Mac. Perhaps I just have dud ears. Or perhaps the fact that you seem to need manual EQ (else also Itunes sounds bad) suggests a problem with your system or room integration.

 

[Schlippwhip68]

It sounds fine to me on a Mac. Perhaps I just have dud ears. Or perhaps the fact that you seem to need manual EQ (else also Itunes sounds bad) suggests a problem with your system or room integration.

I think most things sound better on Apple products personally..

 

[Schlippwhip68]

It sounds fine to me on a Mac. Perhaps I just have dud ears. Or perhaps the fact that you seem to need manual EQ (else also Itunes sounds bad) suggests a problem with your system or room integration.

Hp Elitedesk 800 g2, QED 79strand speaker cable, Aiyima A08 amp with Mcru Belden power cable (recommended), Mission 751 speakers, Topping E30 dac and QED performance 40i interconnects in a 5 x 5m room with soft furnishing...not much to go wrong there...I find an EQ essential in all applications Hifi, Studio and DJ. I cannot control what goes on in the Studio unless i am in there myself so I, we, are at the end of someone else's opinion as we all are as music consumers. I find that the EQ is essential regardless of the platform.

 

[SimpleTheater]

The advantage that iTunes affords is the manual EQ that in all honesty without it iTunes would probably not be my streaming platform choice but it does have it and it is very good.

You could always download Equalizer APO for free and setup any manual EQ to your preference. The bonus is you could actually compare iTunes directly with Amazon because they'd both be eq'd the same.

 

[Schlippwhip68]

Cool beans brother, thankyou.