Amazon Launches Lossless "Hi-rez" HD Music Service

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

Like @rbstehno I was disappointed to find out that I could not stream Amazon music files to a UPNP renderer.  I worked hard to get off of USB and that's a deal breaker for me.   

Buy a Node 2i and call it a day...........

Like @rbstehno I was disappointed to find out that I could not stream Amazon music files to a UPNP renderer. I worked hard to get off of USB and that’s a deal breaker for me.

Yes that’s lame - but marginally excusable: AMHD is relatively new and doesn’t have much tenure yet out in the 3rd-party device/software environment, let alone the open-source audio ecosystem. But given Amazon-as-vampire-squid it’s hard to imagine any other approach other than one that benefits their businesses/services first. Short answer: don’t expect parity anytime soon with Tidal and Qobuz in support of the broader open-source audio community.

AMHD ’lying’ about HD is also lame. So are its feature and UX shortfalls. Simple example: no user-facing feature to create ’stations’ from artists. That problem was solved years ago by the competition - and has been missing from Amazon Music since at least 2014.