Amazon Music Unlimited HD

[Niallivm]

Just a word of warning to anyone looking to sign up for the service after the free trial; Amazon appears to have serious issues streaming its HD and UHD services. All too often there are drops from 24bit/96kHz to 'Standard' without any explanation. Worse, what Amazon call 'Standard' is sub-Spotify/Apple Music quality and immediately obvious.

.
I'm on the three month trial and I've had this happen every weekend afternoon so far. When the service works as advertised it's good and worth the £14.99/m, but it doesn't appear to be capable of meeting demand at peak times and I'm not impressed. It's been widely reported on various forums, including Amazon's own.

 

[Niallivm]

Amazon HD still deteriorating to “Standard“ quality after around half an hour. Today it was at a non-peak time (3pm UK). Album: Coldplay’s Everyday Life.
I’m using the latest version of the App for Mac OS Mojave. No wonder it’s cheaper than Tidal

 

[inias]

Amazon HD still deteriorating to “Standard“ quality after around half an hour. Today it was at a non-peak time (3pm UK). Album: Coldplay’s Everyday Life.
I’m using the latest version of the App for Mac OS Mojave. No wonder it’s cheaper than Tidal

I have been facing the same issue and it is rather annoying. I will not be renewing once the free trial ends either.

 

[Minkey1]

Same here. I'll let the trial run but likely will go with Spotify Premium. I think that'll be a better match for my ears and kit. And save a fiver pm

 

[DREADZONE]

Been fine for me for last few weeks. Would have been nice for Amazon to let us know there was an issue to be resolved.

At the moment I have 3 music streaming subs: (1) googleplay @£7.99 (reduced price because I was an original subscriber) is good for vast catalogue - would discontinue because it is only Standard def, but has quite a few tracks not available from other two; (2) Tidal HiFi @£19.99 - unsure about the assumed improvement in listening experience with Masters: my system unfolds MQA up to 96kHz, and I do notice a nice difference with tracks that were originally mastered well . . . however, Amazon has given me a re-think!; (3) Amazon Music Unlimited HD £14.99 (but currently one month in to enjoying a 3 month free trial) - their HD tracks [CD quality of all material available in CD format] sounds very good, and HD Ultra [= anything above 16bit/44.1kHz, eg 24bit/44.1kHz, 16bit/48kHz up to 24bit/192kHz] sounds brilliant - certainly matching anything I've heard from Tidal Masters. I did a simple listening test with Fleetwood Mac The Chain (2001 Remaster) across both providers and both sounded excellent [the last 90 seconds of this track is a really good test in this genre].
So, jury is out on which to stick with long term; over the coming months I will weigh-up the catalogue merits of each provider. Also, I will examine Tidal's "transparency" with their MQA encoding for Master recordings vs Amazon HD's Ultra offering.
Anyone else compared Tidal HiFi with Amazon Unlimited HD?

 

[Niallivm]

Been fine for me for last few weeks. Would have been nice for Amazon to let us know there was an issue to be resolved.

At the moment I have 3 music streaming subs: (1) googleplay @£7.99 (reduced price because I was an original subscriber) is good for vast catalogue - would discontinue because it is only Standard def, but has quite a few tracks not available from other two; (2) Tidal HiFi @£19.99 - unsure about the assumed improvement in listening experience with Masters: my system unfolds MQA up to 96kHz, and I do notice a nice difference with tracks that were originally mastered well . . . however, Amazon has given me a re-think!; (3) Amazon Music Unlimited HD £14.99 (but currently one month in to enjoying a 3 month free trial) - their HD tracks [CD quality of all material available in CD format] sounds very good, and HD Ultra [= anything above 16bit/44.1kHz, eg 24bit/44.1kHz, 16bit/48kHz up to 24bit/192kHz] sounds brilliant - certainly matching anything I've heard from Tidal Masters. I did a simple listening test with Fleetwood Mac The Chain (2001 Remaster) across both providers and both sounded excellent [the last 90 seconds of this track is a really good test in this genre].
So, jury is out on which to stick with long term; over the coming months I will weigh-up the catalogue merits of each provider. Also, I will examine Tidal's "transparency" with their MQA encoding for Master recordings vs Amazon HD's Ultra offering.
Anyone else compared Tidal HiFi with Amazon Unlimited HD?

What equipment are you using? My issues with Amazon HD degrading to “Standard” were using the Mac OS Amazon app. There’s also an issue where an album may have most tracks in UHD but a few in just HD, and this isn’t just obscure oldies but even new ones, eg WHO by The Who. It all feels as though Amazon HD has been launched without much care or attention.
My family and I use Apple Music extensively so a HiFi streaming service just for me is an extra cost and I thought the £15/m was affordable, but not for a service that is unreliable.
I have Tidal on trial for a few more months. I find the sound quality a little more expansive than Amazon but the search/metadata tagging is awful (especially for Classical). £20/m is too much for me so I also plan to look at Qobuz if they drop the price.

 

[smbmetal]

I've not had any issues and have just signed up to the 30 day HD music trial.

I think it's excellent quality and have been happily listening to 24 bit/192khz (Green Day Warning Album) with no issues at all. All other HD and UHD tracks have streamed fine, with no drops in quality.

I listen through the Denon HEOS app on a AVR 3600H.

The interface isn't the best, but the quality of the music to my ears is fantastic.

 

[Brantome]

I've not had any issues and have just signed up to the 30 day HD music trial.

I think it's excellent quality and have been happily listening to 24 bit/192khz (Green Day Warning Album) with no issues at all. All other HD and UHD tracks have streamed fine, with no drops in quality.

I listen through the Denon HEOS app on a AVR 3600H.

The interface isn't the best, but the quality of the music to my ears is fantastic.

Yeah, but the API Amazon have made available to third parties like Denon/Heos, Bluesound etc doesn‘t provide access to your music library/playlists thru the third party app, and playing to your device via Alexa or casting from the Amazon Music app caps output at 24/44.1 .

And that goes without getting into the failings of the Amazon Music app itself when it comes to HD/UHD playback.

All in all, Amazon Music HD‘s initial implementation has been pretty poor imho

 

[Niallivm]

I agree. I had the service on a three-month trial before Christmas but gave up with it halfway through as the Mac app didn’t stream consistently at “HD” let alone “UHD”.
it felt like it had been released without the necessary back-end server capability to meet demand

 

[Brantome]

afaicr, they fixed the SD dropout issue. See the Amazon forums

 

[davidf]

Whatever shortcoming there are with the service, it won’t change its success one jot.

 

[Brantome]

Whatever shortcoming there are with the service, it won’t change its success one jot.

Probably a fair point - they’ve been pushing it hard of late, and despite its shortcomings, I still prefer hearing most of my stuff (even tracks on my own which I had previously uploaded) playing at least in CD quality now. It helps that I have the family subscription which spreads the costs very favourably .

 

[smbmetal]

Yeah, but the API Amazon have made available to third parties like Denon/Heos, Bluesound etc doesn‘t provide access to your music library/playlists thru the third party app, and playing to your device via Alexa or casting from the Amazon Music app caps output at 24/44.1 .

And that goes without getting into the failings of the Amazon Music app itself when it comes to HD/UHD playback.

All in all, Amazon Music HD‘s initial implementation has been pretty poor imho

That's true. The good news for me is that I do not have any playlists so I'm not affected by this. I can understand why that would be an issue for others though. The HEOS app isn't great, however I'm sure over time this will be improved with updates etc.

However, the sound quality and choice of music more than makes up for that. I'm very impressed by the quality from Amazon and have really enjoyed many 24 bit tracks that I previously would not have had access to.

Awesome.

 

[simonali]

If the sound quality is anything like the PQ on their video service I'll give it a wide berth.

 

[Hawkmoon]

It’s not - “ultra HD” high res content can be stunning and in my experience as good as, or better than Tidal Masters. BUT, some CD quality material inexplicably sounds crap compared to the physical CD - God knows why

 

[Mike Knibbs]

Been fine for me for last few weeks. Would have been nice for Amazon to let us know there was an issue to be resolved.

At the moment I have 3 music streaming subs: (1) googleplay @£7.99 (reduced price because I was an original subscriber) is good for vast catalogue - would discontinue because it is only Standard def, but has quite a few tracks not available from other two; (2) Tidal HiFi @£19.99 - unsure about the assumed improvement in listening experience with Masters: my system unfolds MQA up to 96kHz, and I do notice a nice difference with tracks that were originally mastered well . . . however, Amazon has given me a re-think!; (3) Amazon Music Unlimited HD £14.99 (but currently one month in to enjoying a 3 month free trial) - their HD tracks [CD quality of all material available in CD format] sounds very good, and HD Ultra [= anything above 16bit/44.1kHz, eg 24bit/44.1kHz, 16bit/48kHz up to 24bit/192kHz] sounds brilliant - certainly matching anything I've heard from Tidal Masters. I did a simple listening test with Fleetwood Mac The Chain (2001 Remaster) across both providers and both sounded excellent [the last 90 seconds of this track is a really good test in this genre].
So, jury is out on which to stick with long term; over the coming months I will weigh-up the catalogue merits of each provider. Also, I will examine Tidal's "transparency" with their MQA encoding for Master recordings vs Amazon HD's Ultra offering.
Anyone else compared Tidal HiFi with Amazon Unlimited HD?

 

[Mike Knibbs]

Agreed, the Amazon quality is very good and good value.
After the initial 'wow' factor of Tidal (Masters vs CD) I tired of the sound. To my ears (old ones for sure) Tidal is playing some games with levels and sound balance. Whether this is intentional or simply a product of their proprietary compression I could not say. I find that to do A/B testing on my usual components (iMac, FiiO K5 PRO, Schiit Asgard 3 and Sennheiser HD600) the I need to reduce the volume on the Tidal steam into which ever DAC / amp combo I use. Once done, the difference in sound is consistent and recognizable in blind sessions. The Tidal sound warmer, heavier and more 'center-staged'. It is less detailed and transparent than Amazon - even on CD feeds that are not 'ultra'. While the warmth, bass and loudness of the Tidal stream is initially attractive, it bugs me after a while. The difference in streaming / source versus DAC/Amp combination is huge. Maybe as much as switching headphones or speakers in the testing. I was surprised.
I've canceled my subscription to Tidal after 3 months - and listen entirely to Amazon HD now.

 

[SteveR750]

You might want to verify that Amazon HD is actually streaming in hi-res format. Although it has a toggle for exclusive device use in the settings it doesn't work, so the stream is passed through the windows resampler and streamed at a the default settings (W10 this is 24/48k). If you want to stream A-HD Ultra tracks you'll have to go and manually change your setting in Windows to match the native sampling rate. It's easy to check, try opening a youtube video whilst amazon is streaming, and it will play over the top of your music. If the app has exclusive control (and therefore bypassing the Windows kernel mixer etc) then Youtube comes up with an erro message and won't play. If you use exclusive mode in Tidal, this is precisely what happens, additionally my DAC had a sample rate indicator, and Amazon HD Ultra tracks were streaming at 48k, Tidal rate are the same as the native rate.
It's arguable if you can hear the effects of the windows mixer, but it's important to know this if you're after bit perfect streaming, but it means that unless you change the shared sample rate settings in Windows, you're never listening to his res tracks, in that respect it's a bit of joke player, so you're definitely not quite getting the hi res service that you think you are. I ditched A-HD as soon as I discovered this. Tidal isn't perfect, I prefer the sound from MusicBee when I compare them, but they are small differences and the convenience of having 50 odd million tracks easily outweighs that for me, so I've stopped buying CDs some time ago.

 

[Davywhizz]

I'm currently on a three month free trial of Amazon HD and very impressed so far. I've already cancelled my Spotify subscription, having realised that if I pay for Amazon annually (12 months for the price of 10), plus my Prime membership discount, there's very little difference in the monthly price. And the quality is noticeably better, much as I like everything else about Spotify.

I can check the Amazon streaming quality when listening through my laptop and Cambridge Audio DAC: so far nothing less than CD, often higher, but I'm not on there often. Through the hifi I use a Bluesound Node 2i and the BlueOS app, but haven't yet found a way to check the resolution while playing. My ears tell me it's all good. They are not what they used to be, but I can still pick out the subtle differences in music I know well when I hear it at higher resolution.

 

[SteveR750]

I'm currently on a three month free trial of Amazon HD and very impressed so far. I've already cancelled my Spotify subscription, having realised that if I pay for Amazon annually (12 months for the price of 10), plus my Prime membership discount, there's very little difference in the monthly price. And the quality is noticeably better, much as I like everything else about Spotify.

I can check the Amazon streaming quality when listening through my laptop and Cambridge Audio DAC: so far nothing less than CD, often higher, but I'm not on there often. Through the hifi I use a Bluesound Node 2i and the BlueOS app, but haven't yet found a way to check the resolution while playing. My ears tell me it's all good. They are not what they used to be, but I can still pick out the subtle differences in music I know well when I hear it at higher resolution.

It's easy to check, try playing a youtube video when streaming from Amazon. If it plays then the app is not using exclusive mode, and if it's not using exclusive mode, it's resampling to the default shared setting in your Windows sound settings (unless you change it manually each time, it will always use whatever you've set, the default is 24/48k, so even CDA gets upsampled.
You could argue that hi res audio is unnecessary if you think you can hear it, and in fact it's not hi res! Personally, I can't tell the difference between the same tracks in CDA and anything higher, unless the hi res version has been remastered into the hi res format. Tidal Masters are largely lost on my ears, though to put into context, I can fairly reliably (about 3/4 of tracks) distinguish between Spotify and CDA from some blind tests I got my wife to do for me!

 

[Davywhizz]

Sorry if I wasn't clear, my DAC will tell me the resolution in real time if I'm using Amazon HD on my desktop system. When using it via the BlueOS app as part of the hifi all I can see is either CD or HR in the display. If it was lower resolution there would be no icon. The DAC readings are very positive and confirm what I think I'm hearing. I see no reason to think the quality is any less on the hifi. So far I'm a happy Amazon HD customer.

You must have good ears if you can hear a CDA file!

 

[SteveR750]

Sorry if I wasn't clear, my DAC will tell me the resolution in real time if I'm using Amazon HD on my desktop system. When using it via the BlueOS app as part of the hifi all I can see is either CD or HR in the display. If it was lower resolution there would be no icon. The DAC readings are very positive and confirm what I think I'm hearing. I see no reason to think the quality is any less on the hifi. So far I'm a happy Amazon HD customer.

You must have good ears if you can hear a CDA file!

CDA is CD Audio.

There are a few threads on the Amazon app in different forums, which is what drew my attention to it. Try the you tube test, it's pretty conclusive, or any other audio media player. If the Amazon app is in exclusive mode, nothing else can play, it's that simple. I've tried it on two different PCs in my house, same result, one is W10 the other W7 so it's not the OS.

Amazon Music HD Is Still Lossy

Just over one year ago Amazon launched its Amazon Music HD streaming service. Many people uninterested in the success of small businesses and good customer service cheered the new offering from the 1.7 Trillion dollar company. At the time Amazon's $14.99 per month plan was the lower than all the ...

audiophilestyle.com

Amazon Digital and Device Forums - US

Amazon Digital and Device Forum United States

www.amazonforum.com

Amazon Music HD

I'm streaming Amazon thru a Windows PC to a DAC3L via USB cable. Anyone have experience with this setup? I've read where Amazon doesn't have any options to by-pass the Windows mixer. Is there anything I can do with the PC to get unprocessed audio to the DAC?

www.audiosciencereview.com

Amazon Music HD - Unable to play UltraHD

I just subscribed to a free trial of Amazon Music HD. I have two Meridian Explorer2 connected to two different PCs and hi-fi's. I'm unable to get...

forums.stevehoffman.tv

There's another one somewhere, lots of workarounds, but the concensus is until Amazon does a deal with Roon or Audirvana, or fixes the app bugs then it's not really hi res.

 

[SteveR750]

Another simple check. Set your windows sound settings shared mode to something like 24/192 and then try playing a standard cd quality (16/44) amazon track, if it's silent, then you know it's not in exclusive mode. I'm presuming that you have selected that in the app settings though.

 

[VinylTrousers]

CDA is CD Audio.

There are a few threads on the Amazon app in different forums, which is what drew my attention to it. Try the you tube test, it's pretty conclusive, or any other audio media player. If the Amazon app is in exclusive mode, nothing else can play, it's that simple. I've tried it on two different PCs in my house, same result, one is W10 the other W7 so it's not the OS.

Amazon Music HD Is Still Lossy

Just over one year ago Amazon launched its Amazon Music HD streaming service. Many people uninterested in the success of small businesses and good customer service cheered the new offering from the 1.7 Trillion dollar company. At the time Amazon's $14.99 per month plan was the lower than all the ...

audiophilestyle.com

Amazon Digital and Device Forums - US

Amazon Digital and Device Forum United States

www.amazonforum.com

Amazon Music HD

I'm streaming Amazon thru a Windows PC to a DAC3L via USB cable. Anyone have experience with this setup? I've read where Amazon doesn't have any options to by-pass the Windows mixer. Is there anything I can do with the PC to get unprocessed audio to the DAC?

www.audiosciencereview.com

Amazon Music HD - Unable to play UltraHD

I just subscribed to a free trial of Amazon Music HD. I have two Meridian Explorer2 connected to two different PCs and hi-fi's. I'm unable to get...

forums.stevehoffman.tv

There's another one somewhere, lots of workarounds, but the concensus is until Amazon does a deal with Roon or Audirvana, or fixes the app bugs then it's not really hi res.

This is interesting as I'm currently trialling Amazon Music HD. I've just tried the 'Tube Test' and I get video but no audio, is this what you mean by 'not playing'? Thanks

 

[SteveR750]

This is interesting as I'm currently trialling Amazon Music HD. I've just tried the 'Tube Test' and I get video but no audio, is this what you mean by 'not playing'? Thanks

Yes, that's it. You're one of the lucky ones in whose system it works. There's a long thread on Steve Hoffman audio about it.