Amazon Launches Lossless "Hi-rez" HD Music Service

In a lazy and totally non-scientific comparison across a couple of my 2nd-tier hifi systems:

Amazon Music "HD" and "Ultra HD" quality levels seem comparable to similar-res audio from Tidal and Qobuz (16-bit/44khz and 24-bit/48kHz). I didn’t compare to Tidal MQA. If anyone thinks they can objectively ’hear’ and distinguish hifi audio ’quality’ differences above 48kHz, or if you don’t but really-think-it-matters, read this: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html. <= the irony is poignant, given Mr. Young’s latest gushing about how "Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high-quality streaming to the masses."

Amazon’s web- and Mac/Win native players are consistent with other services’ apps: a race-to-the-bottom in effective UX and functional design. In an equally non-scientific and lazy study I have the Spotify, Qobuz and Amazon apps tied for dead-last, then Tidal at barely better. All of them suck in various ways.

Amazon is still working out issues in their catalog play-back (wrong tracks behind some albums, no tracks behind some "Ultra HD" albums etc). Catalog curation is also kinda ’wtf?’ in places. No surprise - greed/fear/hubris rushes most consumer digital media services to market. What are free trials for, anyway?

Historically HDTracks is no ’true-resolution’ saint either, tho’ fishyness at their scale is/was small ... fry? compared to what A-zon is capable of. And they seem to have cleaned up their act several years ago, after some ’high-profile’ exposure of their antics.

Like @rbstehno I was disappointed to find out that I could not stream Amazon music files to a UPNP renderer. I worked hard to get off of USB and that’s a deal breaker for me.

Yes that’s lame - but marginally excusable: AMHD is relatively new and doesn’t have much tenure yet out in the 3rd-party device/software environment, let alone the open-source audio ecosystem. But given Amazon-as-vampire-squid it’s hard to imagine any other approach other than one that benefits their businesses/services first. Short answer: don’t expect parity anytime soon with Tidal and Qobuz in support of the broader open-source audio community.

AMHD ’lying’ about HD is also lame. So are its feature and UX shortfalls. Simple example: no user-facing feature to create ’stations’ from artists. That problem was solved years ago by the competition - and has been missing from Amazon Music since at least 2014.