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Amazon Music Ultra HD on FireTV cube remarkably better than HD - why?

f1shb0n3

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In my quest to find a good and convenient source for Amazon Music in my living room recently found out FireTV cube supports Ultra HD quality up to 24bit/192kHz on Amazon Music over HDMI. It was disabled by default, but when I enabled it wow, the difference is remarkable and very obvious. Like a vail was lifted from the speakers.

Setup:
FireTV cube HDMI to Onkyo TX-NR656 receiver with Revel W383 in-wall speakers and BIC PL-200 sub.
Important - disabled Dolby processing in FireTV settings, it’s pretty bad when it’s on - sends multichannel Dolby Digital signal that receiver has to down-mix to stereo.

Switching Ultra HD on/off is very quick and allows for easy A/B comparison, even a blind one. The difference is so pronounced that I’m even a bit skeptical some shenanigans might be involved. I would not expect such audible difference between 16/44.1 and 24/44.1. It’s interesting that the difference for 24/192 tracks is even more pronounced.
I’d be curious if a more experienced listener has FireTV with Amazon Music HD and could try it out and share their opinion. Is this really the Hi-Res audio magic or some clever trickery?
Until then I’ll enjoy listening, my living room stereo never sounded so good!
 
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f1shb0n3

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After further testing I think it's most likely the well known confirmation bias. After hearing a significant difference and blindly identifying HD vs Ultra HD multiple times in a row on some tracks initially I could not do it reliably on many others.
I'll play with it a bit more again sometime, but I'm happy for now having a reasonable source with Ultra HD that's convenient to use remotely. Even though my Onkyo receiver probably has a below average DAC performance and the Amazon Music app could be improved with some needed features such as adding a song to a playlist and being overall easier to use. Haven't found the perfect living room DAP solution for Amazon Music yet, this is the closest I've gotten so far.
 

RDoc

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After further testing I think it's most likely the well known confirmation bias. After hearing a significant difference and blindly identifying HD vs Ultra HD multiple times in a row on some tracks initially I could not do it reliably on many others.
I'll play with it a bit more again sometime, but I'm happy for now having a reasonable source with Ultra HD that's convenient to use remotely. Even though my Onkyo receiver probably has a below average DAC performance and the Amazon Music app could be improved with some needed features such as adding a song to a playlist and being overall easier to use. Haven't found the perfect living room DAP solution for Amazon Music yet, this is the closest I've gotten so far.
I've had exactly the same experience, both on Amazon HD and comparing Amazon Ultra HD with Spotify HD. On some tracks, the difference is crystal clear, on others I can't tell the difference. I'm wondering if it's how the tracks are digitized. Some albums/tracks I find really pretty unlistenable even though they're shown as Ultra HD whereas other albums/tracks in just HD sound great.

Also, I wonder if in general Amazon HD is somehow more careful with what it streams than Spotify. In some cases, the Amazon HD (not Ultra HD) sounds significantly better than the same track on Spotify HD. In many others comparing HD to HD and even Ultra HD to Spotify HD, I can't hear any difference at all.
 

valerianf

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I have the new Amazon Fire 4k TV stick and also find a huge improvement of the sound quality.
However I am finding that the 192khz soundtrack is missing some low frequency dynamic compared to the same track in DD+.
It may come from my AVR (Yamaha).
Could somebody give its feeling about the 192khz track low frequency level?
 

jaws72

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I've had exactly the same experience, both on Amazon HD and comparing Amazon Ultra HD with Spotify HD. On some tracks, the difference is crystal clear, on others I can't tell the difference. I'm wondering if it's how the tracks are digitized. Some albums/tracks I find really pretty unlistenable even though they're shown as Ultra HD whereas other albums/tracks in just HD sound great.

Also, I wonder if in general Amazon HD is somehow more careful with what it streams than Spotify. In some cases, the Amazon HD (not Ultra HD) sounds significantly better than the same track on Spotify HD. In many others comparing HD to HD and even Ultra HD to Spotify HD, I can't hear any difference at all.

Hi RDoc, I read your comment and especially this part "Some albums/tracks I find really pretty unlistenable even though they're shown as Ultra HD whereas other albums/tracks in just HD sound great." It's not unusual that some tracks/albums are 'unlistenable' even if they are in Ultra HD, this is because the source, the recording, mixing and finalizing of the album/track itself is done worser than other albums/tracks. It can even be the case that 16bit/44.1 tracks sound better than Ultra HD tracks just because the track/album itself was produced/recorded very badly.
 

xterraguy

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In my quest to find a good and convenient source for Amazon Music in my living room recently found out FireTV cube supports Ultra HD quality up to 24bit/192kHz on Amazon Music over HDMI. It was disabled by default, but when I enabled it wow, the difference is remarkable and very obvious. Like a vail was lifted from the speakers.

Setup:
FireTV cube HDMI to Onkyo TX-NR656 receiver with Revel W383 in-wall speakers and BIC PL-200 sub.
Important - disabled Dolby processing in FireTV settings, it’s pretty bad when it’s on - sends multichannel Dolby Digital signal that receiver has to down-mix to stereo.

Switching Ultra HD on/off is very quick and allows for easy A/B comparison, even a blind one. The difference is so pronounced that I’m even a bit skeptical some shenanigans might be involved. I would not expect such audible difference between 16/44.1 and 24/44.1. It’s interesting that the difference for 24/192 tracks is even more pronounced.
I’d be curious if a more experienced listener has FireTV with Amazon Music HD and could try it out and share their opinion. Is this really the Hi-Res audio magic or some clever trickery?
Until then I’ll enjoy listening, my living room stereo never sounded so good!

Hi, can you elaborate on what was needed to enable UHD on your FireTV Cube? I find no setting to do so. Thanks!
 
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f1shb0n3

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Hi, can you elaborate on what was needed to enable UHD on your FireTV Cube? I find no setting to do so. Thanks!
In the Amazon Music app top right corner then “Audio quality”. For me Ultra HD was disabled by default.
Screenshots attached.
 

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Martin_320

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Haven't found the perfect living room DAP solution for Amazon Music yet, this is the closest I've gotten so far.
Hello, I don't normally drag-up old threads, but on my system something concerning has happened recently (since the last couple of months) with my Fire TV Cube audio with the latest version of Amazon Music app - version 3.4.706.0 .

Here's the problem:
To my ears the sound loudness level when it plays any songs (those marked as "HD" and "Ultra HD") is about half what it used to be! Now I'm having to turn-up the volume knob on my Marantz AV7705 AVP from about 50dB to over 65dB to get the equivalent loudness to what I had before (when I mostly had it set at around 50dB). This basically means the so-called HD songs (indicated as FLAC stream format) are being "bit-crushed" -- which means they are no longer lossless.

Perhaps what is happening is that Amazon is forcing audio "normalizing" onto the audio output all the Fire TV Cube's apps (ie forcing them all to have the same loudness level) -- which of course is a disaster if you bought a Fire Cube for streaming HD lossless music like I did.

I'm trying to troubleshoot with Amazon tech support, and it would be really helpful to know --
Q: Are you, or anybody else, experiencing the same problem on the Fire Cube with the full Amazon Music Unlimited subscription?

Many thanks in advance,
Martin.
 
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