Amazon is Readying a High Fidelity Music Streaming Service: Report (techcrunch.com) 84
Amazon is in discussion with various large music rights-holders regarding the launch of a high fidelity music streaming platform -- and that at least one major record company has already agreed to license it, news outlet Music Business Worldwide reported this week. sqorbit shares a report: MBW has heard this whisper from several high-placed music industry sources, who say the price of Amazon's new tier will likely be in the region of $15 per month. It's expected to launch before the end of 2019. "It's a better bit rate, better than CD quality," said one source. "Amazon is working on it as we speak: they're currently scoping out how much catalog they can get from everyone and how they'll ingest it." The best known existing hi-def music streaming offering comes from TIDAL, whose TIDAL Hi-FI subscription tier costs $19.99 per month and offers CD-quality lossless streams at 44.1 kHz / 16 bit. In addition, TIDAL also offers a 'Masters' quality offering for pickier audiophiles, which presents thousands of albums at 96 kHz / 24 bit.
how about starting their own lable (Score:4, Interesting)
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Amazon Label Prime! Overnight success.
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*) Not digital compression to lower the bit rate, but dynamic range compression. Ever felt as if someone was rhythmically covering and uncovering your ears when listening to a song with a strong rhythmic base drum? That's an example of extreme dynamic range compression: the volume of the less loud bits of the song ge
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In the studio, the less loud bits of the song stay the same because you can apply the compression to just that track. At the mastering stage, there is sometimes full track compression - but it's more likely that artifact is coming from your playback device (except FM radio where extra compression is required to keep the signal in spec).
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Look at the graphics on this page [wikipedia.org]. It's not his playback device.
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Yes - I know about this. But if you run the compressor on the individual tracks, it doesn't cause the other tracks to bump up or down in volume in relation to drum beats. I was responding to this:
volume of the less loud bits of the song get a boost in volume when they are the only thing playing, then get pushed down in volume again as the base drum beats, making them sound muffled
And then I said that there is some level of compression on the full downmix during mastering, but that there are dynamic range compressors active on TVs, "night" mode on sound receivers, and a lot of car stereos factory settings. It's the playback device where you'll see the most jarring volume changes for other
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So on top of the loudness wars, which happens in the studio, there is also a loudness post-processing happening in the hardware itself.
I didn't even know that. But then again I shouldn't be surprised by such crap anymore, since TVs can even stretch 4:3 content into 16:9 for some idiotic reason.
...born every minute (Score:3)
The other part of me thinks, fine, if there's suckers to be taken advantage of, why not accept their money.
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I'm part critical of Amazon for jumping on the bandwagon of catering to the mostly self-deluded customers who think that a slightly higher bit rate is noticeable, and who got suckered into thinking that that's the problem compared to the shitty speakers or headphones that are at the end of the pipe. I would rather Amazon take the high road and help people understand how silly this is.
The other part of me thinks, fine, if there's suckers to be taken advantage of, why not accept their money.
All the high-end equipment in the world won't fix bluetooth which, in my opinion, is worse than high bit-rate lossy compression...
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Bluetooth supports both AAC and MP3 over A2DP with bitrates up to 768kbps. If anything, the problem is the lack of higher fidelity codecs and no transparency about what codecs are in use by the devices you buy.
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>>> no transparency about what codecs are in use
This, oh Lord, this.
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I've got a pretty decently high end system in my living room, and I've tried streaming occasionally on it, and it does sound
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You would be a bit miffed to discover the state of streaming audio after purchasing 60k EUR electrostatic phones with tube amplifiers and marble housing. If Amazon would take this route, they should really invest or show attention on the whole production chain of the music they offer. The evil starts with a poorly informed sound engineer with cheap microphones.
Re:...born every minute (Score:4, Insightful)
CD quality matters for people who aren't listening through shitty headphones. However, higher bitrates really are pointless for listening (they're important for music production, because mixing is lossy and you want the end product to still be CD quality).
Including last minute (Score:5, Interesting)
How about the self deluded people who think that streaming music is better than having your own MP3/OGG/FLAC file on your very own device?
Best streaming service in the world is the Syncthing instance I have on all my devices which synchronizes all my personally owned DRM free music files over every device I own which can play them without relying on any "cloud" services or infrastructure I don't control.
Insist on ownership. Insist on control. It's not hard - there are lots of ways to do it that just work and don't require a lot of tech savvy. There are just too many examples of failed services or, worse, services that get so successful they feel they can start dictating terms of access, propagation, and/or usage.
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How about the self deluded people who think that streaming music is better than having your own MP3/OGG/FLAC file on your very own device?
Well it is. You're talking about an entire industry that fundamentally is built on a broadcast and performance platform rather than an ownership one.
Frankly I have no desire to own music. I have desire to listen to music. That can be achieved without some vegetable salad on my device. Now I have a huge MP3 collection. I listen to it at home through the hifi. It probably makes up about 5% maybe less of my actual listening. So I put it back to you:
What makes having your own MP3 better than having a random lib
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What makes having your own MP3 better than having a random library of 35million tracks at my fingertips whenever I want? Some concept of "ownership" that doesn't actually matter for the purpose of listening to music?
There is a great model that has worked for a long time. Broadcast systems to disseminate music widely, and an ownership system for people to collect and replay the pieces they find they particularly like. Over time, dozens of individual technologies making up the infrastructure for that system have come and gone. The basic paradigm, though, has lasted the better part of a century, and done that for the reason that it's a great system.
As the "broadcast" half of the good old paradigm, streaming services in
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And if that works for you, sure, fill your boots.
So you're backtracking calling hundreds of millions of people "self deluded" then, or calling all your parents and grand parents who listed to the radio "self deluded"?
I honestly have no idea why you'd want to pay Amazon for something when one app on your phone will give you free access to literally a thousand radio stations across the globe, organized by genre, period, and taste. You want to let Amazon netflix your audio, go right ahead.
Curation. To be clear I don't want to pay Amazon. I'm happy with Spotify. The point is music is freely available. The only question is the model. Do you want to listen by genre and get interrupted with adverts (free radio out there), or do you want to listen by personal taste with a curated selection of varied music based on what you've liked
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The elephant in the audio room is the dynamic compression of the signal.
Such compression should be done by the end user's gear (stereo, telephone, computer etc.), and not in such extremes as when EVERYONE WANTS TO BE LOUDER THAN THE OTHERS!!!!1!1
Gah!
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catering to the mostly self-deluded customers who think that a slightly higher bit rate is noticeable, and who got suckered
Perhaps they'd be interested in this special $1,200 HDMI cable. [amazon.com] It completely prevents bitrate loss, insuring that the bits going INTO your system are the exact same as those going OUTWARD to your speakers.
if there's suckers ... why not accept their money.
THERE you go. If you found a $100 bill on the floor, would you pick it up? (Bill Gates wouldn't; it's not worth his time!!)
But what if someone handed it to you?
What if someone handed it to you for a bauble -- maybe they REALLY liked it and was in a hurry.
What if you started selling baubles for $1
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Sort of. Having a lossless 16-bit 44.1 kHz stream is exactly what you want. Jacking it up to 24-bits and 96 kHz. is mostly useless - the 96 kHz makes the analog filtering post D/A somewhat easier, you need a lower-order and lower-phase-shift filter to remove the noise. But otherwise, doesn't matter from an audio standpoint, because there's no reason to (and generally no way to) reproduce anything over about 18kHz in a realizable system. Having frequency response up to the Nyquist frequency of 48 kHz is enti
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24 bits on the vertical axis IS useful.
you are thinking of it in the wrong way. its not about how 'loud' you can get, but its about the number of *steps* (resolution) on the y-axis. this is discrete, not a true analog signal, so the steps are real and more steps IS better. clearly, you can see that, right?
people often get this wrong; they argue that its already a good enough dyn range from softest to loudest, and if you keep the softest the same, the new 24bits can play 'louder'. but here's how to reall
Re: ...born every minute (Score:1)
There are no steps. The reconstruction filter in the DAC will output a smooth signal without discontinuities anywhere.
Recall from high-school math that if you know as few as two (different) points on a straight line, you can reconstruct the entire straight line. If you know as few as three points on a circle, you can reconstruct the entire circle.
The stairstep analogy is not useful in this context: You don't need an infinite number of points to perfectly reconstruct a band-limited signal.
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You don't understand digital signal processing very well. The resolution steps (at 44.1 Khz) are *utterly wiped out* by the output filtering. That filtering is what is at issue with the 96 KHz VS 44.1.
Hi Fidelity (Score:1)
Be sure to buy Monster cables or you will be wasting money on the subscription.
You mean Amazon Prime Music? (Score:2)
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While that's true, if you're not listening to pop/rock/country you might benefit from 24-bit depth for a larger dynamic range.
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That depends. Most movies and TV are mixed with average peak loudness at -6dB. That leaves some headroom for explosions and effects audio at crucial moments while keeping the volume quieter for the majority. CDs are usually mixed to 0dB. If you listen to both on the same speaker system, you have to constantly adjust the volume to get the same perceived loudness. With the extra few bits, you can mix to -6dB without worrying about losing any dynamic range. Yes, I'm advocating for extra bits that will ju
Re: 44k1 / 48k is enough (Score:2)
With proper dithering, more bits really only equates to less noise. You can easily get the dynamic range of 24 bit with a 4 bit recording. (It'd be a noisy, though).
16 bits is more than sufficient to shatter your eardrums while still having completely inaudible noise levels.
Dynamic range issues are a problem that's created during mastering when the powers that be want a female singer crooning gently to sound just as loud as a death metal band screaming full tilt.
It's a people problem, not a technology prob
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Not every audiophile has more money then brains.
Sadly a few of these insane idiots [amazon.com] give a bad name to the remaining rational ones.
What else do you call someone passionate about audio (quality and gear) but only spends $200 - $500?
Multi channel audio (Score:2)
When will music become available in 5.1?
That would sound amazing played through a compatible system such as a home theatre system with kodi on a set top box.
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Well, it will become prevalent whenever artists start having their albums mixed and published in 5.1 or greater.
I believe one of the Pink Floyd DSOTM editions has a 5.1 surround mix.
Frankly, I think the biggest battle would be to stop the fscking compression wars things...and allow more dynamic range into modern recordings again. Remixes have ruined some old titles by compressing the shit out of them.....
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That is stating the obvious.
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It's been available for over a decade in SACD/DVD-A. And DVD-A is compatible with just about every DVD and Blu-Ray player out there. But nobody wants to record in that format. And converting existing music is as bad an idea as colorizing old movies. There also isn't any demand.
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I don't use Blu-Ray or DVD.
I am one person, so that is a demand - and I won't be the only one. Even if classical orchestral recordings were available in a 5.1 digital format it would be pretty sweet!
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I don't use Blu-Ray or DVD.
Good job? Rip it, then. But the tech is not taking off so you'll probably never get any closer than this.
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Surround sound is great for sound effects, where the whole idea is to put the viewer in the middle of the spectacle. The music is still generally just a stereo upmix.
Music will be mixed in 5.1 when concerts start having the audience sit in the center while the band is spread out in the periphery. I’ve not been in many such concerts.
Outside of a band member being *in* the audience, the only thing surround channels bring to music is to simulate reflections produced by the recording studio.
Most recording
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It doesn't. It really doesn't. Surround sound music has been a thing since back in the days of vinyl with quite good 4.0 control of sound. 5.1 doesn't add anything to a system over 4.0 providing that system is made up of well placed full range speakers, and there's a reason surround sound hasn't taken off despite being available in high quality for the past 50 years.
I did go to an SACD tech demo last decade where Sony was trying to revive the concept of 5.1 but the problem ultimately is what do you do with
Hifi over Wifi? (Score:2)
I am still surprised that every single publisher (Score:2)
hasn't started their own streaming service and completely fragmented the market of things like Amazon and iTunes.
I mean just look at streaming video....
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hasn't started their own streaming service and completely fragmented the market of things like Amazon and iTunes.
The music publishers still hate the existence of the Internet with a burning passion and want it all to go away so they can sell albums for $25 again. The old guard who lost that fight will have to die off before the music publishers willingly tolerate any more streaming. They only let Apple have their catalogs because Apple promised unbreakable DRM, protected by Apple's walled garden. Then Apple altered the deal and was too successful to cut off. They're busily trying to starve every streaming service
This will make my bluetooth headphones... (Score:2)
... sound amazing! Good thing headphone jacks are going away!
It's not gonna sound different from a CD (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY. 44.1 kHz is enough to reproduce up to 22.05 kHz sounds perfectly, which is the most anyone can hear. The misconception that you need more granularity in your sampling comes from people misunderstanding how the Nyquist theorem [wikipedia.org] and digital sampling work. They don't understand how measuring only two regular points per cycle in a waveform is sufficient to perfectly reproduce that waveform. So assume that a higher sampling rate produces a superior reproduction.
Monty Montgomery's video [youtube.com] is the best explanation and demonstration disproving this misconception that I've seen (first third of the video). He uses analog equipment to generate a high-frequency wave, sends it through a digital sampler, has the computer convert the digital sample back to analog, and uses analog equipment to measure the output. He shows that right up to the Nyquist frequency (half your sampling rate), the digital conversion process still reproduces the same analog wave as was sampled. The non-obvious thing that most people fail to grok is that up to the Nyquist frequency, there is one and only one analog waveform which fits all the points measured by the digital sample. So those two samples per cycle are sufficient to reproduce the analog waveform perfectly (up to the Nyquist frequency).
Bit depth is a different argument. In theory 16-bits should be more than enough since your ears are only able to hear a few hundred different levels of volume. Heck, 8-bits should probably be enough. But your ears operate logarithmically, whereas a CD's sound sample distributes those 16-bits linearly. That is, CD sound "wastes" a lot of bits encoding tiny differences at extremely loud volumes, while having insufficient bits for extremely low volume sound. (the second third of the video covers this - low bit depth shows up as having a higher noise floor, thus interfering more with extremely low-volume sounds). So there is some benefit to higher bit depths. However, as the video explains, you can accomplish the same thing (to your ears) not by increasing bit depth, but by dithering.
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Filters aren’t the problem they were in 1979 either. Cheap ubiquitous DSP’s mean that none need to settle for an inferior “simple” filter, when a better sounding “complex” filter is just as cheap.
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20khz is a truism: It's an average. Some people can hear a little higher than 20khz, and some people can't. There's data that shows some people can hear up to about 28khz. (Which is still less than half of an octave above 20khz, not much.)
A lot of data savings comes from lossy formats trimming the high end down a bit, somewhere between 15-18 khz. Again, this is "good enough" in many cases: Cheap speakers, low volumes, older ears.
I ran a study about what lossy trims out, with graphs that show where the loss
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Some people can hear a little higher than 20khz
Yeah maybe one or two people on the planet can, for a couple of years of their life. The vast majority of people over the age of 20 can't get past the 16-18kHz range. It's a reason why some governments used high pitched buzzers with these frequencies to keep youths from loitering at train stations.
There's data that shows some people can hear up to about 28khz.
I would like to see your data.
But ultimately we're arguing semantics because as good as someone can here there's the sad fact that there's nothing up there to be heard. Take a look at a spectro graph of music. Whi
Most not demanding high fidelity (Score:4, Insightful)
The average person doesn't use good enough quality hardware to come close to hearing the differences. You have to have very expensive headphones or speakers and a good digital to analog converter to benefit from the better stream quality. Beats or Bose don't come close, or Sonos in home systems. Sorry, they are great for what they are, but you won't benefit from spending money on better audio streams. Being a audiophile myself, I think its a shame we have lost a lot of quality with digital, bluetooth wireless, and small tiny mono speakers. But most people seem satisfied with that.
Really? (Score:2)
Then I can use my $80 cable lifters to keep my internet tube out of the dust ensuring I have the CLEANEST possible sound. Hopefully they still work just as well as they do with my stereo cables!
https://www.analogueseduction.... [analogueseduction.net]
CD (Score:2)
>""It's a better bit rate, better than CD quality,"
LOL. Right. Like having a 12,000 dpi printout instead of 600dpi, or an 8K 70" display at 10 feet instead of a 2K, or a billion colors instead of 16 million colors, or recording at up to 120,000Hz instead of 20,000Hz. My guess would be that 0.00001% of the population could ever tell the difference between CD quality and anything greater. Sure, there are some poorly mastered CD's, but that is not the fault of "CD quality", that is the fault of poor mas
I had problems with Tidal (Score:2)
A few years ago, I wrote software to compare lossy to lossless, and determined that lossy compression was only useful when listening through cheap speakers. Because I use high quality speakers, I decided to subscribe to Tidal: https://andrewrondeau.com/blog... [andrewrondeau.com]
After about two years, I started having problems. Tidal would go into a mode where I had to restart the application in order for it to stream. Sometimes it wouldn't work for hours. Their support would ignore me, or claim it was a problem with my inter
I stream my own music (Score:2)
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