Tidal is so screwed! I have Tidal currently and hate it. Only about 20% of my playlists are actually Hi-Fi quality and some songs actually sound worse than Apple Music. At $20 a month for Tidal that is a lot and I would gladly cut them out of my wallet as soon as Apple Music has lossless.
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Amazon Music Matching Apple by Offering Hi-Fi Tier at No Extra Cost
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For those of you pining for the best quality music, like I try to get, here's something you may be interested in. For me - CD quality is what I'd like to have everywhere I go. A lot goes in to what you actually hear though. The source material is absolutely critical. How it gets to your amp, then how it gets to your speakers and finally what the speakers are capable of reproducing compared to everything else. So here's a website with a test you can run for yourself and what you listen with.
abx.digitalfeed.net
An article I found was using the highlighting the Spotify test - but I found this list. Doing the test, you are trying to figure out if X is either the A source or B source. If you play A then B and don't hear anything different, you're not going to benefit from what some call HD Audio.
I remember the old 128-bit MP-3 compression having some kind of artificial sound added to it. Seems 128-bit compression has grown up. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just the bit rate.
Edited to add: I've been using Amazon HD for a few months now. I download the music to save on my data budget for when I'm out and about. The app is certainly lacking in management, I'll give you that. But the added library of "unlimited music" is real nice to have compared to standard Prime Music.
ABX High Fidelity Test list
A set of browser-based ABX tests comparing lossless and lossy music samples
abx.digitalfeed.net
An article I found was using the highlighting the Spotify test - but I found this list. Doing the test, you are trying to figure out if X is either the A source or B source. If you play A then B and don't hear anything different, you're not going to benefit from what some call HD Audio.
I remember the old 128-bit MP-3 compression having some kind of artificial sound added to it. Seems 128-bit compression has grown up. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just the bit rate.
Edited to add: I've been using Amazon HD for a few months now. I download the music to save on my data budget for when I'm out and about. The app is certainly lacking in management, I'll give you that. But the added library of "unlimited music" is real nice to have compared to standard Prime Music.
'CD Quality' is limited to 16bit and isn't even all that great for music with substantially wide dynamic range. Modern audio formats can exceed those limitations, hopefully they are.For those of you pining for the best quality music, like I try to get, here's something you may be interested in. For me - CD quality is what I'd like to have everywhere I go. A lot goes in to what you actually hear though. The source material is absolutely critical. How it gets to your amp, then how it gets to your speakers and finally what the speakers are capable of reproducing compared to everything else. So here's a website with a test you can run for yourself and what you listen with.
ABX High Fidelity Test list
A set of browser-based ABX tests comparing lossless and lossy music samples
An article I found was using the highlighting the Spotify test - but I found this list. Doing the test, you are trying to figure out if X is either the A source or B source. If you play A then B and don't hear anything different, you're not going to benefit from what some call HD Audio.
I remember the old 128-bit MP-3 compression having some kind of artificial sound added to it. Seems 128-bit compression has grown up. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just the bit rate.
Edited to add: I've been using Amazon HD for a few months now. I download the music to save on my data budget for when I'm out and about. The app is certainly lacking in management, I'll give you that. But the added library of "unlimited music" is real nice to have compared to standard Prime Music.
I don't know what you refer to when you say 128bit MP3 compression... I don't think that is a thing. There was MP3 compressed with an audio file rate of 128 kbit and was touted in the early days as being CD equivalent... but that was quickly realized to be a farce as the debate raged on about whether 192, 256 or 320 was going to be preferred...
More modern codecs, aac, ogg, opus, and more do much better on quality at any given bitrate when compared with mp3.
I have amazon prime music so their free reír for prime members and satisfies 90% of my music playing. If there is something not available there due to being on their higher tier I just YouTube it.
Sorry, but Amazon didn't copy Apple... they just lowered the price of a service that they've had for a long time. Amazon has had a UHD music and 3D music service since they released the Echo Studio. Amazon Music’s HD catalog has more than 70 million songs with more than 7 million Ultra HD tracks (and many more that are HD rather than UHD). I don't know how many 3D songs are available, but they have also been around since the Echo Studio was released. Apple is actually catching up in this case. You must be thinking of Amazon's "free" music service that is included with Prime.
All those people on here who rush to wish ill and failure on Samsung (and any other Apple competitor) really need to look and learn from this. Without decent competition Apple would 100% of charged for it, Amazon demonstrates this.
Here though, thanks to competition, the customer at least wins.
Just got an email saying no extra charge for HD now.
50 bucks off a year of the family plan. I'll take it.
Only tech savy person in the house and everyone loves their Alexas playing whatever they want. I just wish they would fix carplay because their carplay integration is absolute garbage.
50 bucks off a year of the family plan. I'll take it.
Only tech savy person in the house and everyone loves their Alexas playing whatever they want. I just wish they would fix carplay because their carplay integration is absolute garbage.
This was back in the 90's. And it's the bit rate I'm referring to. CD Quality is 16-bit, but at a rate of 1,411 kbps. I don't recall 128-bit rate being touted as CD quality MP3 format. But that was many years ago. I was never satisfied with it and never considered it as being CD quality. 192 and 256 - were much better. But still lacking. The compression algorithms just weren't there yet.
Looks like we are confusing each other as I've listened to CD's since they came out with some complex / dynamic range music and can't fathom anything can sound better than what was produced. Orchestra / Classical is some of the most complex, dynamic range music you can get. It's taken a long time for pop and other genre's to get close.
Yes, I agree the newer formats are much better quality - but to me, they are closer to what we get / got off of CD. I'll qualify that with 2 channel audio. Not the multi-channel options we have today that definitely benefit from higher bandwidth / rate formats.
