Streaming question

[Wolfgang]

I am testing the amazon streaming service and signed up for HD/ultra HD which means that I get their best CD quality streaming.

I am recording the songs I like in my studio and play them on my main system as I have no internet access in my music player PC.
I realized after a while that the recorded songs sounded a little different compared to my ripped CDs. It was more a general feeling than some real audible difference.

I checked them with some programs but I can't interpret the meaning because both are 16bits/44.1kHz but one is cut off above 16kHz.
The blue line is the CD, the yellow the recording, the white the correction curve.

Also in another program I find the same difference while the program identifies both as 16bit/44.1kHz files. what's going on here? Is this normal for streaming?

test rec b.jpg (72.04 KiB) Viewed 2627 times

[Nick]

I wonder if the problem is not the transmission, its the fact they are sending from a copy that's band limited/ I remember having heard stories of purchases from Amazon of CD's arriving on CDR that were not original stamped CD's and likely to be from their own copies rather than the original

[Wolfgang]

It's obviously an MP3 file (32kHz, filter cut off at 16kHz) upsampled to wav . It still is MP3quality but is recognized as as 44.1/16 wav. I don't want to draw false conclusions like whether that's Amazon's general policy or not but it's not CD quaity and my test recordings looked like that.

I don't care because Tidal delivers the full resolution (same test like with Amazon files but looks like full CD quality).