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TIO takes a closer look at three of the leading players Down Under: Spotify vs Apple Music vs Amazon Music. Spotify has been held up as the leader of the streaming brigade, the head of the recording industry’s White Knights. It’s the best known global brand, without doubt, though it’s not the first all-you-can-eat platform.
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CD-quality and high-resolution streams require much higher data rates than the compressed music on Spotify, Apple Music, or the standard tiers of Tidal, Qobuz, and Amazon Music Unlimited. Amazon Prime Music, Spotify Music, Apple Music, Pandora Music and the like are waving to you. They claimed that they are awesome and the best choice of all the services. Whereas confronted with lots of dazzling Music services, such as Amazon Prime Music and Spotify Music, you may be confused to which kinds of music services you are certain to. Amazon Music Unlimited expands that catalog to 50 million songs. The big difference between Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited is Amazon offers a tier of service for use on one Echo device for $3. Spotify free seems to have more ads/more frequent ad breaks than Google Play free does. Music Prime Amazon Overview: Not a dedicated Streaming Service, persea, but a ‘freebie’ that you may already be a subscriber to if you are an Amazon Prime Customer.
Audiophiles have long prophesied a day when all music would stream in high resolution and the MP3 would be retired to a comfortable recliner from which it could swap war stories with 8-track tapes and laserdiscs. They considered the September announcement of Amazon’s launch of HD high-resolution music streaming to be as consequential as Apple’s introduction of the iPhone. Non-audiophiles, however, barely seemed to notice Amazon’s HD music launch.
Perhaps they should have. Since May, the field of companies offering high-res audio in the US has expanded from one to three major players: Tidal, Qobuz, and now Amazon. The fact that the world’s 13th-largest company by revenue has entered the high-res streaming business has to be significant for the music industry, but with high-resolution streaming costing up to two and a half times as much as a standard non-high-res service like Spotify, does it offer a benefit that average music listeners will embrace?
Answering that question demands a brief dive into the basics of sound-recording technology. In digital audio, resolution refers to the precision with which a digital representation of an audio signal matches the original signal. Resolution is expressed in two numbers: word depth in bits (which tells you the difference between the loudest and softest sounds that can be recorded) and sampling rate in kilohertz (which lets you calculate the highest frequencies of sound that can be recorded). In both cases, more is generally considered better. CD resolution is 16 bits and 44.1 kHz (written as “16-bit/44.1 kHz” or sometimes just “16/44.1”), and that has been considered the baseline for high-quality digital audio since the early 1980s.
About 15 years ago, distribution of music in high resolution—usually 20 to 24 bits and 96 or 192 kilohertz—became possible thanks to digital downloads. Companies like HDtracks and Acoustic Sounds offer high-resolution downloads of many current and past albums. More recently, music listeners’ switch from CDs and downloads to streaming services inspired the launch of Tidal Hi-Fi, a high-resolution service offered by Tidal, the streaming company famously purchased by Jay-Z in 2015. Tidal Hi-Fi uses Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) technology, which “folds” high-resolution audio data so that it can stream at lower data rates, but it doesn’t carry 100 percent of the added data.
In May of this year, the Qobuz (“ko-buzz”) service debuted in the US with high-resolution audio compressed with FLAC technology, which reproduces 100 percent of the original audio signal. The new Amazon Music HD service uses the same FLAC technology.
Tidal costs $20 per month for a mix of both CD- and high-resolution streaming and $10 per month for 320-kilobits-per-second AAC streaming (the same compression technology Apple Music uses). Qobuz originally charged $25 per month for high-res streaming, $20 per month for CD-quality streaming, and $10 per month for 320 kbps MP3 streaming, but in early November 2019 it began offering a limited-time deal that includes all of its content for a flat $15 per month, or $12.50 if you pay on a yearly basis. The plan will only be offered through January 31, 2020 to the first 100,000 subscribers. Amazon charges $13 per month for CD- and high-resolution streaming for Prime members and $15 per month for everyone else; for 256 kbps MP3 streaming, the prices are $8 per month for Prime members and $10 per month otherwise.
So you’re paying a premium of 63 to 150 percent for high-resolution streaming. Is it worth the cost? Spotify desktop windows download. The answer, of course, depends on whether you can hear the difference, and whether that difference is important to you.
Compare Spotify With Amazon Music
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Studies have shown that the difference between high-resolution audio and CD-resolution audio is “very subtle and difficult to detect,” as a 2010 McGill University paper titled “Sampling Rate Discrimination: 44.1 kHz vs. 88.2 kHz” put it—and that test was conducted for a panel of 16 audio-engineering professionals and students using an audio system costing more than $20,000. Boilsoft spotify converter free download. Through the headphones and speakers that typical music listeners are likely to use, the difference would be even harder to hear. A difference that is at best barely and sporadically detectable would be unlikely to make your music listening substantially more enjoyable or give you deeper insight into the music.
However, most audio experts would agree that uncompressed music at CD resolution sounds noticeably better than music compressed with technologies such as MP3 and AAC. The difference isn’t always dramatic, but if you listen to my online Bluetooth blind test (which demonstrates the effects of various audio compression technologies) through a decent set of headphones or speakers, you’ll likely hear that uncompressed music tends to have more detail in the treble—so you’ll hear a little more ringing in the cymbals, more snap in the snare drum, and more twang in the acoustic guitar.
Is that improvement worth the added expense? For me, it hasn’t been. I’m fortunate enough to have a houseful of outstanding audio equipment that should reveal any flaws in a music stream, yet I find that Spotify’s highest level of quality—using the MP3-like Ogg Vorbis audio-compression technology and streaming at 320 kilobits per second—conveys the soul of Aretha Franklin, the power of Led Zeppelin, and the spirit of John Coltrane as well as higher-quality services do. The recordings that make me cry when I hear them on CD or vinyl still make me cry when I hear them on Spotify.
And then there are the bandwidth issues. CD-quality and high-resolution streams require much higher data rates than the compressed music on Spotify, Apple Music, or the standard tiers of Tidal, Qobuz, and Amazon Music Unlimited. A CD-quality stream requires a data rate four to five times higher than even the highest compressed-audio data rate, and a 24-bit/96-kilohertz high-res FLAC stream requires a data rate seven to nine times higher. This isn’t a problem when you’re streaming music at home with an unlimited Internet plan, but streaming 24/96 FLAC on your phone for just a couple of hours will probably exceed your mobile plan’s monthly data limit. You could set all of these services at much lower data rates, but you’d be losing that extra quality you’re paying for.
All that said, I’m still contemplating a switch to Amazon Music HD or Qobuz. I’ll end up paying just $3 more per month than Spotify, and because evaluating audio equipment is my job, the extra quality may occasionally come in handy—even if it won’t make an audible difference with most of the devices I test.
For me at least, cost is the distinguishing factor among the three services. Neither of the other services seems to offer any significant advantage over Amazon Music HD to justify the higher price. After using Amazon Music, Qobuz, Spotify, and Tidal extensively, I don’t have a real preference for any one interface. All of those services have most of the albums I want to hear, and all suffer from a few omissions.
If high-res matters to you, Tidal has the weakest offerings as of this writing, with apparently only a few hundred albums in high-res MQA. Qobuz claims more than 2 million albums in high-res, although many of those are presented in 24 bits but with a CD-quality 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Amazon simply claims “millions” of albums in high-res, and more than 50 million songs in CD resolution.
Smart watch for spotify and running apps. I expect that most audiophiles, musicians, and others who have a strong personal or professional interest in music reproduction will make a calculation similar to mine and invest a little extra in getting the best sound. Average music fans, though, will be happy listening through Spotify or Apple Music—and waiting for the day when, like high-definition video, high-resolution audio becomes a standard offering available at no extra cost.
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