High resolution audio from Amazon

I think the current Roon product with Tidal and Qobuz will attract most of the existing customers plus plenty of new ones. Adding Amazon does nothing until/unless Amazon gets their act together.

I don’t agree as I like to think that more competition can only be good for our little niche hobby. My household relies on Amazon for most things and find that they make our lives a bit easier.

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They already have.

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For me it is not working either, complains that Amazon Music is not available in my region. Works fine on iPhone and Echo though…

Spotify and Tidal of course work here as well. Amazon Music HD is not available yet either (but the regular Amazon Music Unlimited is).

Qobuz is not any better:

So with Roon, Tidal is the only option at the moment…

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@Craig_Palmer thanks for your insights… please keep sharing if you hear anything new from your connections!

I thought I had a pretty good vision here (get Jeff Bezos into Roon!):

Spotify or Spotify HiFi in Roon [spotify will not allow this]

What is clear is much change ahead with 5G and emerging technologies.

Agree that Tidal, Qobuz, and Roon are all in precarious position even though they may want to remain independent.

My perfect scenario:
Sharing, playlist, discovery features of Spotify + HiRes + Roon + dynamic mobile solution + multi room slickness of Sonos + artist getting max $

Hard to get it all!

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Well I’m back. After a good effort to use Amazon music I just couldn’t take it. It’s sound quality is good but the navigation in the app is terrible. Also I couldn’t find an affordable way to stream the HD music to my system, Roon gives me options for that. I rejoined Tidal my son in college used his student status for a discount.

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Jim from the 901 to any other Bose products I would not own one. However if you don’t high performance system it might be the good way to go. Maybe

A post was merged into an existing topic: Integration of Amazon Music High Resolution

The latest version of the windows app has exclusive mode. This would allow Roon to work properly with the service.

Saw this today on another forum:

I can’t access Amazon Music HD from my country.

Maybe someone could test and confirm?

The new version allows exclusive mode.

@steveoat87 can you share screenshots of the options/settings for it?

It does not set the bit-rate on my Pro-Ject Pre Box S2, so no bit perfect,

image

It also appears not to remember the selected settings across app restarts :unamused:

This is actual more like hog mode. It takes full control of the volume and doesn’t allow other programs to output sound. It’s not auto changing sample rate like Qobuz or Tidal does. So still useless for hires.

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I am using the exclusive mode with my Oppo HA-2SE DAC. Unfortunately, the Amazon Music app believed the DAC’s capability tops out at 24 bit/48 kHz…obviously wrong. I realized then that Amazon is looking at whatever the Windows properties are for the device which sets a default bitrate. So, it looks like the “exclusive” mode Amazon is using still relies on the Windows sound output and it seems all music is getting resampled to the max Windows output rate. I have mine now set at 24 bit / 192 kHz but I believe this isn’t bitperfect still.

Same behavior on MacOS. If you set a bit rate (using OS util), then set exclusive mode in Amazon app, the app adopts whatever rate you set, and actually will not let you change it.

This may be a good sign, as the app is in some sense controlling the bit rate, just not switching it per song (yet). One would think that capability will be coming down the pike sooner rather than later.

That behavior is the same as iTunes and is not a good thing. You want the app to control the output like roon does in exclusive mode. So no matter what the utility is set that app will change it based on the actual file it’s playing.

Not sure if any updates were made to the mobile software but it also didn’t change sampling rate. Even though software claimed it does, the dac would should the same input not matter what.

Also, does not support upNp

Amazon has not shown any interest in adding bit rate conversion to its service. That is really the crux of the matter for many of us who are accustomed to using music services that utilize that feature.

No MQA :slight_smile: