Amazon Launches Lossless "Hi-rez" HD Music Service

dynaquest4"Fidelity ENDS in the recording studio."
This is completely erroneous fidelity ends with the Music Reproduction System and the room within which it is engaged the recording system itself can account and represent for no more than half of the final end result at the user's ears.

david_ten:

Oops...no I had missed that article but I am (as you have read) in perfect agreement.  And I thought the Hi-Rez Audio definition ONLY applied to equipment, not media.  Did Amazon just wave a wand and change that? 

The world of music media (And hardware) if full of dishonesty and deception...preying on people who do not appreciate the powerful influence of expectation bias.  

I switched from LPs to CDs in the late 80s and never looked back.  I played around with SACD in the 90s and decided, while it sounded better, it wasn't a significant enough improvement to buy all my music over again.  Many, like me, caused that marketing effort to fail.  I'm thinking Amazon may end up with egg on their face.

...fidelity ends with the Music Reproduction System

You are confused, clear (or not-so-clear) think.  The engineers in the recording studio are not concerned with your equipment (music reproduction system?).  they are concerned with the quality of the recording and the media that contains it.

You are always contrary so I will not debate this further with you.

44.1K/16bit is not a HD format. I don't know why Amazon call it HiRes. for most people an MP3 320kps is more than enough and compact on mobile device. For audiophile folks on this forum, 96K/24bit is barely minimum. I would say 192k/24bit or DSD64 get you into real HiFi. And only Qobuz have the most HiRe. Tidal's MQA is 2nd next to Qubuz.

Thank you usery for your link to the https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html link.  Now i know for sure that the higher res files (beyond cd quality) don't matter to me and that I couldn't really tell a difference between Spotify at high quality sound setting and Amazon cd quality or ultra high resolution sound quality.  Of course i also discovered on the audiocheck.net website that i can't hear anything above 13kHz either!