High resolution audio from Amazon

Why would they buy roon, if anything they would buy Sonos, much bigger user base and it does so much already. Roon is not their target audience IMO.

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

The only issue here is that itā€™s almost pointless to have CD-quality/hi-res streaming if you canā€™t output bit-perfect audio, and, right now, on the Windows desktop app, unless Iā€™m doing something wrong, everything is being routed through the OS mixer.

There is no means of choosing an output device for exclusive playback.

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Can I add my Amazon HD account to my Roon service? Thanks Steve

When you consider that the upfront annual charge for Amazon Music HD family plan is Ā£199 and supports up to six streams, thatā€™s Ā£199/12/6 or Ā£2.76 per user per month, versus Qobuzā€™s Ā£24.99ā€¦

And thinking about it, using the Echo Linkā€™s digital output, it gives you Alexa voice control of the HD stream. Might finally justify the unit which Iā€™ve thought till now was looking for a use caseā€¦

Hi Slim. Where did this number come from? I may have missed it.

Is anyone having trouble with the ios app outputting hires? My Chord Hugo is not changing colors for different rates. Just shows blue. Comparing same album in Qobuz and Qobuz sounds much better and showing correct color for 96k output.

Have you updated the app?

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necessary.

I didnā€™t have app before. So just downloaded today. I even tried deleting and re-redownloading.

Iā€™ll see how the Mac app works at home.

Really hoping this works out. Better catalog than Qobuz and no MQA like Tidal. Plus works with Alexa speaker. Just need roon integration.

No, Roon only supports Tidal and Qobuz at present.

There is active feature request topic that sprung you todayā€¦ you could add a request to that.

I think for now itā€™s the former but Iā€™m hoping that a download store will follow.

Why would they care about killing off their CD business? I would have thought they would be delighted with that outcome. Sell a CD for $10 (or whatever) then have to physically ship it to the customer vs sell an HD download for more money (in my experience the markup for a CD-quality download is at least 20% and sometimes more like 50% more than buying the physical CD) and no need to go and pick an item from a warehouse, package & ship it. Any CD sales that they could shift to HD downloads would boost both revenue and margins for their music sales.

I donā€™t know. How big is the overall HD music market? Does Amazon hope to grow it? I note that already on day 1 it is listing on its description page a bunch of high-end hardware manufacturers but no Meridian, Chord, Linn, KEF etc which are all Roon endpoints. By working with Roon to enable Amazon integration it then gets a path to stream its content direct to all those Roon endpoints. Donā€™t underestimate the power of exposure at time of purchasing high-end audio equipment. I would never have heard of Roon or Tidal if I hadnā€™t seen them promoted by KEF when I bought my LS50 Wireless (admittedly I was living under a rock as far as streaming went until a couple of months ago).

I could even see a case for Amazon buying Roon. ā€œWhat devices can I watch/listen-to your service on?ā€ is a pretty crucial FAQ for most services and having a broad range of devices and making it easy to set up on those devices can be critical to success. Roon brings some useful end points to the game and also its integration with locally stored purchased music could play nicely in the Amazon ecosystem if Amazon were to also offer a download store because Amazon could integrate one-click purchasing into Roon to buy HD downloads and put them into your Roon library automatically. Amazon also has AWS so could offer a remotely hosted (on Amazon servers) option for a userā€™s Roon Core which would make setup way easier for non-technical users. With all that combined Amazon could put together a pretty comprehensive set of high-end hardware partners and get a pretty strong lock on a customerā€™s music streaming and purchasing activity.

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What happens if you choose wasapi or asio drivers as the default output device on your PC? And if you also disable the other audio outputs (under ā€œsoundā€ in Windows).

Well disappointing the App does not get exclusive use of the DAC on a pc so is sending all audio at the soundcards set rate, no SR switching, Very disappointig. I sent feedback from the app about this. Maybe they will listen.

Makes no difference it has no exclusive mode. I just used my Dragonfly and its using System audio as everything is 96/24. ,

It wont do this on windows either.

Yeah, canā€™t find it right now, but someone (danny, I think) mentioned it in passing.

Since then, itā€™s been linked to a couple of times.


andybob says "next milestoneā€™, but I think thatā€™s been cracked.

Also -

Thanks for the info, @CrystalGipsy, and thanks @danny2 for the response.

This is unfortunate, but, itā€™s early days yet. If Amazon wants to bring higher quality audio to the masses, these are hurdles that the average user will not care to navigate, but, options such as output selection need to be there, at least for the initial group of users who will drive this service.

To be fair, it took Spotify YEARS to allow output selectionā€¦Anyone remember a little program called ā€œFidelifyā€?