I was listening to Amazon Music Ultimate (4 month free trial) and played Pink Floyd's "The Wall". The album said it was "Ultra HD" which is supposed to be 24-bit, 44.1 up to 192 kHz.

It sounded pretty flat to me, much worse than I recalled, so I played a recording I had made of the record in 24-bit 48 kHz. This was much cleaner, more detailed, less "muddy", and sounded the way I remembered the record.

What is the deal with Amazon Music? Is it just highly-detailed recordings of bad source material?

I don't know about the sound quality, as it seems fine for me, but the app locks and closes and does all sorts of weird stuff all of the time. We're pretty heavy in the Amazon infrastructure and I've heard some bad business practices at Spotify, so I don't even know what to do.

I don’t have any weird performance issues with it on iPad or PC at all. But I’m wondering about the source material, especially since they tout the recorded quality of what they are presenting. And where and how do they get the source material anyway? Do they make a recording of every album they sell?

My experience with Amazon Music was that the fidelity (and the interface!) was terrible. I think it's just massively compressed, and the life has been sucked out of it.

That is my impression of the sound as well. What good is it using a high bitrate when you do that? I don’t have a big issue with the interface, but it could be a lot better.

I would assume they just get whatever the record companies provide.

I don't really think Amazon would bother making their own recordings of albums, even apart from potential legal issues. Seems overly labor intensive for a company that monitors its employees bathroom breaks down to the second.