Probably because their Echo devices wouldn’t benefit from the integration. They’d have to open up Alexa cast (I mentioned this in another post today) for Roon to be able to play to Echo devices. To be honest, I’m so sick of Bluesound and their players dropping off the wifi network that I’d move over to echo once their Amp improves and the echo studio gets to at least gen 2.
i’m not, but it would be interesting to compare the Pulse, Echo Studio, HomePod, and whichever Sonos speaker supports Alexa.
I have free Apple Music provided by Verizon. I never use it.
My trial is finally over I won’t be renewing. It’s a very flawed service with no thought to how you can listen it unmessed with and bit perfect. I don’t see this changing any time if at all.
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My impression is that Amazon’s HD service is preying on people who simply don’t know any better. “You can stream at 999,999 kbps!!!”. Which is, of course, true… But for those of us that know how this all works, pulling massive bitrates down from a cloud / streaming service is or isn’t useful depending on:
- the source of said files (original masterings? “High Dynamic Range” re-releases? Or simply previously released CDs upsampled to 999,999?
- how to get the “o” right in “I/O”… So we’re getting things in at a high bitrate? Great. Now I gotta get it OUT to my expensive, purpose-built, dedicated right-tool-for-the-job outboard without some all-in-one Swiss Army Knife tool like a phone, tablet, or latop (poorly) resampling/upsampling before those high bitrate files make it to said DAC.
Amazon either doesn’t know any of this (incompetence), or does and is preying on the fact that some percentage of their loyal customer base doesn’t (malicious/insidious)… Either which way it’s no-bueno, and those of us with Roon accounts need to Preach the good word to our non-Roon friends if/when they express an interest in this Amazon “Ultra HD”… Point them towards Qobuz, Tidal, Roon, 7Digital, HDTracks, Bandcamp, Foobar, JRiver, Audirvana, etc etc etc… Until or unless Amazon fixes these (glaring) weaknesses.
Yep, that’s precisely where I landed. No easy way to actually play what I was paying for.
Amazon hiring:
One of the listings:
Roles and Responsibilities
· Develop and execute overall strategy for 3P HD and audio distribution in collaboration with product and team team
· Launch partnerships with relevant players within the HD audio space working closely with the product and tech team
· Own the relationship with key audio/HD partners and partnership performance:
· Establish a partner marketing programme for HD
· Be the go-to-person and expert for Audio/HD device partnerships at Amazon Music.
Strange that they turn on the hires content ahead of having the proper team to make it a successful launch.
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They must have thought it was going to be easier than it is.
I have a stereo-paird HomePods and stream from Qobuz and Roon to them and they sound great. I’m hoping that Roon supports AirPlay 2 soon, but as is it works OK and I’m happy with the setup.
I tired Qobuz and left Tidal immediately. The main reason for leaving Tidal after years of subscribing was that I would have terrible starts/stops or outright failures while driving all over the Bay Area. Qobuz doesn’t suffer from that weakness, is cheaper and has a catalog that is close to Tidal.
As John Lewis is selling HomePods for £229 I decided to order online and give it a try and here are my initial impressions,
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Set up was a breeze was up and running within 2 minutes, 10 out of 10 for that. Compared to my Bluesound products it was like comparing the 21st Century to the Stone Age setting up.
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Sound quality was very good with MP3, Flac and Hi-Res although is subjective and the limitations of Airplay. A comparison with my Pulse 2 revealed no difference sitting on a cabinet in my bedroom and listening from about 10 feet away. So for casual listening is perfect ( May try a stereo pair sometime in the future ).
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Now for most important reason why I intend to keep the HomePod and sell the Pulse. Connectivity, Unless the Pulse is virtually on top of the router streaming via Wi-Fi is just impossible if using in other rooms? ( Was using a Netgear Extender in the Bedroom!. ). As the HomePod has no ethernet connection you would expect the Wireless performance to be excellent as it is and would not be on the market for long if it was not.
Although the HomePod is not intergrated into Roon streaming via Airplay is totally adequate in most situations but you may disagree.And yes the lack of intergrated streaming services and radio stations is a big deal for a lot of people but not for me.
AV Forums has reported that Apple, Amazon and Google are now talking with one and other to make future integration between products a lot easier so good news there.
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I’d rather give my money to Sonos than Apple and at least it has integrated services and works with Roon.
I may be misunderstanding the airplay capability of Roon, and what’s in the HomePod. Is the latter Airplay2 only, and Roon only supports airplay 1?
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They can use either, But if you want a stereo pair you need to use Airplay2 as that supports grouping and and multiroom. Roon only supports Airplay not Airplay2 due to licensing.
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TLDR.
FWIW, I think it’s good to look at the market direction of tech/content to understand what likely happens to music services (like Amazon) and companies like Roon given these trends.
Here’s a few of points to consider:
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The entire tech/media industry is consolidating into large media companies that get to must-have status (i.e. Disney/Hulu, maybe Netflix, but in the long term, Netflix’s future is murky) and companies that provide an integrated offering of tech/media/commerce (Google, Amazon, Apple, ATT, etc). As cable audiences bail, consumers will fragment to become customers of a small subset of those that offer the best critical mass whether it be content alone (like Disney/Hulu), hardware ecosystem + content (apple), commerce+hardware+content (Amazon), etc. The latter at least will have to have very strong TV/Movie/Music offerings over the long haul.
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If this is the only way to win, then it is almost a fait accompli that any independent content companies (Tidal, Qobuz, and even Spotify/Netflix) will likely be acquired as they will be crushed long term by offerings by major media companies that have critical mass and tech/media conglomerates that don’t have to pay the bills on content alone and will undercut on price like Amazon. (btw Spotify still isn’t profitable and Netflix went almost $2.5B cash-negative this year to try to build up it’s content mass – a level it can’t sustain over the long term) Who are likely buyers? Just look at any major tech company that doesn’t have any media. First up on my list would be Sprint/Tmobile after their merger is completed. They need something big to compete with ATT. If ATT and Sprint/Tmobile have content, Verizon will likely have to jump. Next would be all the obvious major players who want to beef up their media offering (Apple, Google, Amazon). The chance that any current independent content companies morph into long term major independent of the strength level of Disney/Hulo is slim to none IMHO.
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Given the fact that disk space is becoming almost free and network speed is increasing massively with 5G, HD for everything will become defacto. It’s already become almost defacto for tv/movies and one of the big side effects of Amazon’s HD offering is it likely will push the others (Apple, Spotify, Google) to offer their own HD services as while none of them (except for maybe Spotify) are scared of Tidal or Qobuz, no one wants to give Amazon an advantage. This will further (unfortunately) devalue Qobuz and Tidal and hasten their need to be acquired or die.
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As someone who had arguably the #2 exec at Amazon on my board of my last company, I have some insight into the way they think. They don’t care at all about the short term, they play to win long term. Selling books led to them to sell everything. An incomplete set of web services (that they used first internally) when launched has led to their massive cloud business. I would be very surprised if the shipping/distribution network (that they have developed to use internally) will one day be a direct and brutal competitor to ups/fedex shipping for anyone. With this background, they absolutely want to win the home from apple and google. This is why they launched Alexa. It’s why they bought twitch – yes they like increasing their footprint in gaming – but twitch gave them a very large footprint of video consumers in the home that they could expand. It’s why they acquired Ring. It why they are launching their own speakers. HD music is clearly another step in this strategy. While their initial HD music offering has many issues, they will address them over time and don’t need to get everything right at once.
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Multi-room capability and ease of setup are becoming commodities. It used to be only Sonos but many players will offer this and of course this devalues Sonos and drives them to extreme measures like suing Google (which they are now doing), but the chance of them winning is slim in the long term. They will also likely be acquired by one of the big boys.
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This brings me to Roon. As previous stated, I believe Tidal and Qobuz will be acquired (or die). When this happens, more than likely, the larger acquirer who has a different agenda will pull back on the metadata access that Roon needs to provide their service as they will working to provide more of what Roon does themselves (HD, Multiroom, etc). Amazon HD in my mind is still a wild card. They could choose never to offer the kind of access Roon needs to integrate properly or choose to offer an expansive APIs (like they do with Alexa) to get everyone attached to their offering given their late entry. The jury is out here and their decision could have a major effect on Roon. All of this probably means over time that Roon gets driven to have much less choice (or no choice) in its deeply integrated music offerings and users start migrating to inferior solutions that cost less but are good enough. When this happens Roon will probably have to solely align with one partner or choose to be acquired even though that is not the direction they want to go as they have publicly stated many times.
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While I am pretty confident the above plays out very close to they way I’ve laid it out, what I’m not confident is how long it takes for all to play out. Timing in the tech/media market is extremely difficult to predict. When the mp3 was invented by my friend Karl-Heinz Brandenberg (and others) at the Fraunhaufer Institute in 1978, many industry pundits predicted the end of physical music sales within 5 years. It took almost 14 years for this to happen but then digital downloads sales were surpassed by streaming in 4 years. No one predicted how fast that would occur. No one really predicted how fast cable subscriber would decline (and it is accelerating). So this could play out in 2 years or a decade or more. That is the big question mark in my mind.
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Does any of this make me less of a Roon fan or afraid to invest in using their service? NO. You have to make decisions on today’s facts and what they do today is unmatched in the industry. I’ve paid for 2 roon installations and subscribe to both Qobuz and Tidal. It’s critical we support Roon and the music industry (and those that best support artists). And the continued support of Roon today will help give them the financial underpinnings to find the right way to navigate the rapidly changing market in the best way possible. I do hope they can find a way to integrate with Amazon in the right way and I hope it’s a while before the independent content companies get gobbled up. That would be the best for Ron. It would be great to see a third offering like Amazon in the Roon content mix IMHO.
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And the last and most important thing about all of this is that I could be wrong on everything.
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This sounds mostly right. Amazon’s desktop app is so close. It plays CD and-hires files, has very good “station” playlists and discovery features, a massive catalog, and rudimentary local file/library integration for people who still care about that. Other than phone/tablet control of the desktop app, the only thing missing is exclusive mode bit-perfect playback, which would be trivial to implement yet they inexplicably refuse to do so. Maybe that’s some sort of 3d chess strategy that will become clear at some point.
Then they have integration with their Echo and Firestick devices in various states of sq and usability. And Alexa.
They have all the pieces to kill everybody in the streaming and playback software spaces, and to seriously damage the multi-room space, once they put all those pieces together.
Well I was looking for an echo link that could playback their 24/192 files and be controlled from my iPad. They didn’t upgrade their hardware when they rolled out HD. I was also looking for bit perfect output for mobile solution and that hasn’t happened yet. I don’t feel they are even close yet.
The general ‘not interested in quality’ public will be perfectly happy with Amazon devices. Cheap and Great for background atmosphere. They will love the voice control (gimmick) and multi room. That is all Amazon care about as they have a link to the masses for everage.
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I think an Echo Link & Amazon Music HD is a very, very poor ‘relation’ to what we have with other music services, and their integration and use with Roon.
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