Article: Amazon Music HD Launches

[monteverdi]

On 9/23/2019 at 7:12 PM, bobbmd said:

@pwhinson i  totally disagree--- when Qobuz came online in the USA i tracked down @dmacktaon linkedin who responded immediately got me in contact with a young man in their nyc/brooklyn office who arranged for my 'french address' Qobuz account that i had for years(my address was oneida new france which i thought was really cute/cheeky since that is what ny and the north east would have been called if the french had won on the plains of abraham)-in any event this young rep had the account  transferred from france to a usa account with all my favorites all my hundreds of playlists and my itunes library he gave me a new new name and password and immediately answered all my questions----like Chris implied never probably happen with Amazon----check mr Mackta and @David Craff credentials i am sure they are just as impressive and more so and in @dmackta case he is/was deep into the music recording/label business in europe

both of them answer questions complaints etc very well

plus Qobuz integrates with Audirvana and ROON(as does TIDAL) and both 'players' forums blogs etc plus their presence on AS(just imagine @rickca's harvard law-EE at amazon directly answer you like the founder of Audirvana does @damien78-and makes changes 'on the fly' so to speak to make A+3.5 even better) make them invaluable to us at AS and i just don't see Amazon ever doing that unless they buy up ALL of them and they just want a market share and have no interest in audiophiles per se

I had a Qobuz account for years which they changed to France when I could not download some music apparently not available in  the US. I also subscribed to their Sublime + and enjoyed to find a lot of interesting music, lot in hires. I recently asked them to change the langue to English or German as my French is very lacking so the account got changed to US. Now around 40% of my favorite list is inaccessible mostly the more interesting and obscure albums. After contacting support they made 2 of these available but that is little help for my selection. So I am quite disappointed with US version of Qobuz.

 

I just testing Amazon HD and I am not amazed by the availability of music in certain areas. Spotify has still the best catalog and maybe the best thing Amazon HD will do, is inducing Spotify to make lossless streaming available. 

My attempts to stream "ultraHD" have failed. Using the Amazon music app on my  Mac it tells  me the res of the album but refuses to play it at more than 16/44.1. And also tied to use it on my Astell&Kern but unto now it completely refused to play anything (no issues with Qobuz and Spotify)