I have tried Amazon Music and ran into a serious (and deal-breaking) problem with it. I am surprised that I have not seen anybody else write about this.
When listening to an album that is only available in CD-quality (oddly called HD) they will replace individual tracks with high definition versions if available on other albums. On my first go-around two years ago, I found five or six instances where they had replaced a track with an incorrect version of the song. That was within the first hour of using the service. Sadly, things have not gotten better.
Check out the remastered version of The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Somehow, three tracks are in Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos, while the others are all in HD. Clearly, those three tracks are from the 2019 remix of the album, while all of the other tracks are from the 2009 CD release.
On the special edition of Something Else by the Kinks, several of the mono mixes have been replaced with ultra HD stereo mixes. The tracks still say mono, but are definitely stereo.
Another example is the Bootleg Series recording of Bob Dylan‘s Rolling Thunder Review. They replaced one of the tracks with a different high definition version. Clearly the track A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is from a different release than the other tracks on the album. I doubt the publisher sent this to Amazon with only one Ultra HD track on the album. Compare it to the same track from the same album on Qobuz. They are clearly different masterings, if not different performances.
How can anyone have any confidence that they are actually hearing what they want to listen to? I listen to a lot of classical music. How can I be sure that I am listening to the conductor or the soloist that I have selected? How can I be sure that Amazon didn’t just decide that the third movement of any given symphony should be replaced with a different recording?
For me, this constitutes a fatal flaw.
I wrote to Amazon about this problem last year and they suggested that I check my Internet bandwidth. Not very helpful.
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