So I took advantage of the Prime Deal Days to sign up for free Amazon Music Unlimited for 4 months. One nice aspect of Amazon Music Unlimited is its inclusion of HD and Ultra HD tracks/albums.
I’m better understanding the use of the PS Connect app, but wanted to also understand if the app is taking advantage of the HD and Ultra HD feeds coming from Amazon Music? Of course, it is logged in to my account, but just wanted to better understand how the integration works.
For example, using the “Bridge” input, when I am at the main input screen (showing volume, etc.) it the Strata shows, in the lower left hand corner 44.1<16bit when I am connecting my iPhone to use the PS Connect app via WiFi. Is that accurate in terms of the bitrate I am getting from the stream to the Strata? Or, is the Strata connecting directly to my Amazon Music account and able to take advantage of the HD and Ultra HD feeds?
As usual, LOVE my Strata and much appreciate the insight to understand a bit more about how the streamer is processing these tracks.
Good question, the Strata is only able to handle up to 44.1/16 through that Bridge input, so it’s not able to take advantage of the HD or ultra HD feeds.
HD is 16/44.1 FLAC which is better than whatever lossy format regular Amazon Music uses. Would be nice to support this natively or identify an app where it would work.
Well, as I understand it, CD quality is 44.1/16 bit, so honestly, I am happy with that going via the wireless/bridge input.
According to this review of Amazon Music at
“Amazon Music Unlimited has two types of high-quality streaming: high definition (HD) and Ultra HD, both of which are encoded by the lossless FLAC codec. There are also standard quality tracks available of up to 320 kbps with lossy compression. HD audio streams up to 850kbps, which is more than double the bitrate of lossy. You can enjoy more than 50 million songs in 16-bit/44.1kHz [CD quality], which is a huge lossless library to have at your fingertips.”
That ought to be a large enough CD quality library for these ears.
Thanks @jamesh !
Sorry to resurrect an old thread. I’m looking at purchasing a Stellar Strata and I’m wondering if it ever got native Amazon HD support or if you still have to “cast” to it at CD quality?