Amazon Launches Lossless "Hi-rez" HD Music Service

I enjoy streaming as much as the next guy however what is being offered as premium Hi-Res , HD and what have you at is not as advertised and all the services do it of course .
Im going to be speaking with another recording engineer whom also subscribes to another popular streaming service whoms work he noticed at least one of his recordings is offered as Hi-Res which in fact was originally recorded on tape .

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.