Amazon Launches Lossless "Hi-rez" HD Music Service

I recently chatted with one recording engineer whom found some of work on Amazon that is being sold as HD when in fact it’s 16/44 .

If you pay attention, you will realize that this is just a matter of semantics. Amazon calls 16/44 "HD". And anything above that is "Ultra HD".


That said, I have found that a few titles are not in either. Just whatever the standard stream rate is, 320 kbps I am assuming.

If you pay attention, you will realize that this is just a matter of semantics. Amazon calls 16/44 "HD". And anything above that is "Ultra HD".

Yes....but anything "above" 16/44 or ULTRA HD (as Amazon claims) would have to have been originally recorded in a 24bit studio to be actually be superior to 16bit....and little has.

Curious to hear the quality. I use Amazon for movies and, even though they are "HD" sound, the sound quality never seems to be as good as when I play the same movies using blu-ray or UHD blu-ray disks.  

For movies, I assume there's compression, dithering, or whatever going on there.

While streaming, to me, is entirely viewable and listenable, I still get Blu-Ray discs from Netflix specifically as my understanding is that, regardless of the speed of your internet service, streams will always be of lower overall (audio and video) than BR discs.  

But a better reason is that the newest movies are only available from Netflix on disc.

But this is really an entirely different subject.

This is not hi-res quality music. Most songs seem to be redbook cd quality. Hi-res quality can be 24/192, but DSD and MQA are of much better SQ. Since I have hundreds of DSD or 24/192 songs ripped, and also stream Tidal MQA, I use roon. I will never use USB to connect to an external dac so I use Roon server on a Mac and my PS Audio DS sr dac is accessed using wired Ethernet. Right now, nobody else has perfected using Ethernet going to a dac. As soon as Roon has an update to gain access to Amazon so I can compare an Amazon HD song to a Tidal MQA song, I’m happy with Tidal