Article: The Next Track: Episode 159 | Amazon Music HD

[Sal1950]

3 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

In just about every category of what makes me select a product, Qobuz wins. Sure Amazon beats everyone on price, but in the grand scheme of things the price difference between all the services doesn't even amount to the sales tax on a USB cable for some people.

Most agreed, my 2 cents.

I would never deal with Tidal as long as the company was under control of Jay Z and his little crew of gangsters.

 

I tried Qobuz for 2 months. Its the only one that has a way to direct stream the data to my DAC under Windoz10. Sounded fine like a any lossless stream should. But I'm a Linux guy and no native app for it. It's 25 albums of multichannel recordings is a joke. Too pricey for now.

 

I signed for the 90 day trial. Also sounds good but as mentioned, no easy way to get unmolested data to a DAC so it ends up choked by Windoz anyways.  Good pricing though.

 

As it stands, none offer IMO as good a catalog, UI, etc; as Spotify,  it has a native Linux app and sounds just fine for now

The first one that offers a full catalog of multichannel music will get my money away from Spotify. 

[Sal1950]

On 9/27/2019 at 2:38 PM, bbosler said:

 

I am suggesting that it is odd that all of the sudden they have Neil Young at 24/192 and Elvis at 24/96 along with many others. I am stopping short of accusing anybody of anything, but if they want to make a believer of me and many others they need to tell us where they got all these high resolution files. 

 

We got burned by HDtracks when they first started up when they were selling upsampled files. They claimed they were victims of the people supplying the files, but If I could see they were upsampled why didn't HDtracks take the time to verify what they had? And again, not accusing Amazon of anything, just a bit leery. Ask yourself this, do you think the executives at Amazon really understand the difference between  16/44.1 upsampled to 24/192 and files that are natively remastered at 24/192 ??

 

I haven't figured out how to show the spectrum of the feed from Amazon HD, but if somebody can do that it will clearly show a brick wall filter just below 20KHz if these are upsampled CD files, hopefully they are not

 

 

Oh well, it's all a money game played like Three Card Monte anyway.  You can remaster and up-sample an original analog recording till the cows come home and it will never be a High Definition file anyway, the resolution and dynamic range never existed. Or you can take a original digital recording and up-sample it to the limits of technology and it will never add a single bit of information that wasn't on the original master.  Mark Waldrep argued for some sanity and honesty in the labeling of digital files and got decapitated by the financially controlled audio industry organizations for his efforts.  Paying extra for anything above Redbook is like throwing money down the toilet in the VAST majority of cases, it not all.