[Left Channel]

This morning there was an update for Android.

I don't know what changed and Amazon didn't give any details.

Does any one know what changed?

Looks like you've just received the update that adds the new Music HD service, unless they forgot to change the What's New info for a minor bugfix release. I saw that same update message over a week ago, and haven't received any new updates since.

Huh. I just got that update too. No telling if it's a small bugfix that includes old What's New info, or if this is happening because I have two Google accounts on my phone. Android is messy sometimes. And that's the way we like it.

 

[Left Channel]

Amazon has just released a Music HD compatible Alexa device, the Echo Studio. The announcement also says they're going to support Dolby Atmos music. Atmos music may be a topic for another thread, but I must say it seems like an abomination to me. I'm sure some folks will find it tickles their brains just right though.

 

[Andrew_WOT]

Qobuz has 25,000 subscribers in the USA, and 200,000 worldwide, most of them audiophiles. Tidal has millions of subscribers, but only a small portion are audiophiles. Those numbers are just "rounding errors" to a company like Amazon. But to Qobuz and part of Tidal, it's their whole business model to charge more to fewer customers, and the Qobuz USA GM has publicly stated their goal is to capture only 1% of the market: audiophiles. Will Amazon care? Hard to say.

Tidal and Qobuz are not even registered in the streaming services market share report, falling under Others category.
https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/mid-year-2018-streaming-market-shares/

But what is the point of introducing lossless "audiophile" tier at all if you can't deliver it properly to the end user. I am pretty sure they are busy fixing this already.

 

[Left Channel]

Tidal and Qobuz are not even registered in the streaming services market share report, falling under Others category.
https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/mid-year-2018-streaming-market-shares/

But what is the point of introducing lossless "audiophile" tier at all if you can't deliver it properly to the end user. I am pretty sure they are busy fixing this already.

Is that really what they're doing, targeting audiophiles? There's a lot more money in selling Echo Studio units to people that will enjoy the highly processed sound of Doby Atmos. "HD" is just gravy on that goose.

 

[Andrew_WOT]

Is that really what they're doing, targeting audiophiles? There's a lot more money in selling Echo Studio units to people that will enjoy the highly processed sound of Doby Atmos. "HD" is just gravy on that goose.

We'll see in 90 days or sooner. I can't imagine Echo market is that big, but this is just speculative, and how on Earth anyone could tell lossless from lossy on that tiny speaker to pay extra for HD.
Would be quite silly for amazon losing customers just because of the little thing like exclusive mode support, few lines of code, I am sure customer reps got their share of complaints already.

 

[exdmd]

Enabling exclusive mode would be a big step. I would have to see how it sounds compared to Audirvana+ streaming Qobuz. Audirvana+ manages computer resources to reduce noise and improves on the sound of the desktop Qobuz app. Noticeable enough that I only use Audirvana+. Opening up their API is something Amazon may not want to do to enable Roon and Audirvana to integrate Amazon Music HD though, time will tell.

 

[Left Channel]

We'll see in 90 days or sooner. I can't imagine Echo market is that big, but this is just speculative, and how on Earth anyone could tell lossless from lossy on that tiny speaker to pay extra for HD.
Would be quite silly for amazon losing customers just because of the little thing like exclusive mode support, few lines of code, I am sure customer reps got their share of complaints already.

The Amazon folks are calling this their first high-end speaker, and are actually recommending people buy two for their "home theaters". The microphones automatically tune the speaker to the room, like Apple and Sonos products do.

This is all about using Atmos to sell electronics to a lot more people than would ever switch from Qobuz or the Tidal audiophile segment. But hopefully they'll get around to supporting us too.

Here's an article that includes a photo of a transparent mock-up showing the placement of the speakers: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/25/...os-sound-listen-hands-on-specs-features-price

 

[muski]

No update announced for the Echo Link for high-res support —so still only 24/48 digital out.

 

[rkw]

No update announced for the Echo Link for high-res support —so still only 24/48 digital out.

When they get around to it, most likely hi-res support will be through firmware update over the web.

 

[muski]

When they get around to it, most likely hi-res support will be through firmware update over the web.

Yes, that's what I was thinking. Let's hope it's a software issue, not a hardware one...

 

[John Blackshear]

The service sounds good with my rig.

 

[RickB]

I'm finding that it sounds noticeably better than Spotify. I don't use Audirvana so I've never really had "exclusive mode" or whatever the Mac equivalent is called. However, my music app Swinsian has a setting to automatically set the right bit rate/sample rate for each track. It would be nice if the Amazon Mac app could do the same thing.

 

[Tanelorn]

So HIby does bitperfect using ANY android app? (i wonder why that's something Hiby can do, but Fiio and Ibasso cannot?)...and If I'm hearing you right, for some reason Tidal should be able to do Bitperfect as is on Hiby but Amazon HD cannot due to some way it works?

Hiby Does, but...
Amazon does not check that and only checks for software. It recognizes it is android and so the App wont let you play Music on higher bitrates, because Amazon just assumes every android player will have the standard Android limitation.
I alsready opened a support case and reported this via the feedback function but not enough people complained, so the prio is oltra low.
if you want to have it fixed, please spam amazon with reports about that..

 

[Tanelorn]

Right... If I wanted EQ, I'd do it myself. I think this is amateur stuff for them to be doing. Sounds like they are misleading their customers in more ways than one. I'm also hearing from a peer that there are tracks that will down sample Ultra HD to 16 bit / 44.1 while still displaying Ultra HD (obviously this should just be regular HD). I don't think this thing should've been rolled out with so many bugs & issues.

try to switch off volume normalzation in the Amazon music app. its magic XD

 

[Tanelorn]

It is mp3 which Amazon has encoded as 256 I believe.

320, but yes, mp3