High resolution audio from Amazon

Audio Gear Talk Music Services
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“It’s a better bit rate, better than CD quality,” said one source. “Amazon is working on it as we speak: they’re currently scoping out how much catalog they can get from everyone and how they’ll ingest it.”

The best known existing hi-def music streaming offering comes from TIDAL, whose TIDAL Hi-FI subscription tier costs $19.99 per month and offers CD-quality lossless streams at 44.1 kHz / 16 bit.

In addition, TIDAL also offers a ‘Masters’ quality offering for pickier audiophiles, which presents thousands of albums at 96 kHz / 24 bit.

TIDAL’s ‘Masters’ range is made possible by its partnership with digital hi-def music company MQA. It’s understood that Amazon has not partnered with MQA for its own HD tier.

(link originally spotted on audiophilestyle)

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Perhaps they could try ‘working on it’ a bit longer before they actually publicise and release the press release?

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Care to share Amazon’s press release ?

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I imagine based on other Amazon prior “leaks”, this is an attempt to learn from public comments to steer the product design.

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Sweet. The cd quality wars will start when this happens. All of them will offer cd quality when this happens.
Roon , time to get to work getting Amazon set up.

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Oh,the streaming is supposed to be better than cd 16/44.1. Sweet!

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Amazon should just buy Tidal.

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Once Amazon is in ,all the major players will go Hi res ,except maybe Apple who are behind the time in AI and many other things.

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Apple might. There were previous discussions

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According to the report here
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/amazon-is-readying-a-hi-def-music-streaming-service/

Amazon is preparing to launch a high res streaming service soon. Cost is predicted to be $15 a month and quality “better than cd”. No doubt you will be able to say “Hey Alexa …”. Anyone know anything? Will Roon be able to integrate this?

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Amazon doesn’t really care about music so I’m doubting it’s a well designed service but we’ll see. It’s only a matter of time before all the services begin to roll out Hirez options.

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It occurs to me that Amazon may well host cloud services for the likes of Tidal, Qobuz and even Apple so they know exactly how popular these services are and who the customers are. Not accusing them of anything, just saying.

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This is probably true but if it gets most major players like Spotify and Apple to start offering cd quality or better streaming it is a huge win for us !

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Has anyone seen this? Could end up worthwhile for prime users. Would love another option in Roon for streaming though I feel this is a long way off.

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According to several websites amazon is moving towards better than cd quality streaming.

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Yep, been discussed on 3 different threads.

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I personally would welcome Amazon. Tidal has lousy customer service and inconsistent streaming performance and I wouldn’t hesitate a moment to leave. Frankly, when Qobuz came into the market a couple of months ago, I was ready to leave Tidal, but their limited catalog is what kept me with Tidal.

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It’s a better bit rate! Reminds me of some of the hype around the pono music store pre launch… which turned out to be a real damp squib

I welcome it too as progress (hell - anything to bury mp3’s) but assume the reality will be mostly cd quality with a much smaller ratio of actual high res. Just like the others.

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I’m fine with CD quality streaming, at least its lossless.

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Nice news. It might finally push spotify towards CD quality streaming. That would change the game, because honestly, nothing beats Spotify’s UI and algorithms. Spotify connect beats Roon hands down for ease of use. Almost true PnP. But… I’m not subscribing because of poor SQ.

As for being limited to Amazon devices: have you seen and heard what a humble Fire TV stick is capable of? Stick this in a receiver with a decent on board DAC and you’re up and running at a very low price point.

Crossing my fingers and hoping…

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