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Have limited experience with music streaming from the internet, save YouTube. I'd assume YouTube sound would be dodgy, though there's some recent streams from that source that are of surprising high quality. I would guess that the upper tier of Amazon Music would be at least high-quality MP3. But some of the streams from Amazon have been suffering from very audible flutter of some sort. I've noticed it in particular with harpsichord and lute recordings. Anyone else have this problem? Any suggestions?
At some point, there were such audible artifacts reported as affecting streamed audio contents, attributed to watermarking. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_watermark
Could be related to that - or not.
I'm not sure how to do that. I heard the problem at the Amazon website with Nigel North's volume 3 of music of John Dowland and two different recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations, one being Gustav Leonhardt's last recording for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, the other Blandine Verlet's recording for Astree. Initially, all is fine, but about five minutes in, the sound gets bad. Nothing subtle about it. To confirm, I listened to my copy, on flash drive, of Nigel North's volume one of Dowland [mostly hunky-dory, but there parts of that disc that were damaged before I ripped the music, but that's operator error]. I wouldn't know how to make a link to Amazon Music, but if you have access, those are rather specific examples. All are standard, not upper tier. I've heard other streams from Amazon that were fine, some were "Ultra HD", which were just as fine.
I haven't heard this problem on Amazon Unlimited yet, but I remember one CD in my collection which inexplicably seems to exhibit some annoying "wow" in playback. The recording is within Sony's 144-disc Arthur Rubinstein - The Complete Album Collection and specifically Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat with Ormandy/Philadelphia Orchestra (1971). This Rubinstein/Ormandy collaboration is not a particularly ancient recording among the items within this mega-huge box set; the session was produced by RCA's legendary Jack Pfeiffer and I don't recall there being any particular pitch "wow" in its prior incarnations on LP.
Huh Bach is in standard defeinition even on my ultimate account. Never seen that before , thought only plebian users were subjected to that. So thats likely 256kbMp3 possibly badly converted. My advice , there seemed to be hunderds of options for bach variations maybe try a different one?
This one is in 16/44.1FLAC by the same composer
Check out Bach: The Goldberg Variations, BWV988 by Gustav Leonhardt on Amazon Music
This is a great forum and I have been reading in it for a couple of months with interest. I thank you all for the wealth of information contained here.
I am a philosopher. I teach a philosophy of science course! I also have a background in music. This is my first post.
I noticed a flutter on some tracks streaming on Amazon Music and other services about three years ago and wondered why this was happening. I saw some references to "audible watermarking." I didn't use the service very much for a while but started again recently and it didn't take me long to find more examples. I thought I would check on this forum and I saw this thread. Here are my examples:
(1) Mozart Requiem, Karl Böhm, DG recording, track 1, starting around 1:00 in. Using Amazon Music app for PC, Audacity to record the sound coming through my computer.
No flutter. (I don't have the CD of this one either.)
I'm wondering what could cause this. If this has been discussed to death already, I apologize for the duplication. I did do a search, and this is the closest I found.
Sorry to revive this old thread but I recently heard the same issue on the Mozart Requiem recording noted above with Amazon Music Unlimited using the Amazon app on my IPad Air 2 or running the same service from the Web Player over Chrome. I do not hear the "flutter" with the same recording when using the Qobuz app on the IPad or with their Web Player over Chrome. In both Amazon and Qobuz, the Requiem recording is listed as CD quality--16 bit, 44.1 KHz.
I'd have to assume this is an issue with Amazon's version of the recording or with some setting in Amazon Music. I noted this behavior with either the 'HD' or 'SD' playback options selected in the Amazon settings.
