MULTICHANNEL MUSIC BACK IN FASHION?

Amazon has upped the ante in the streaming music wars, and High Res Audio will never sound the same again...

It’s official! Multichannel music is making a comeback - and this time it’s being delivered by one of the most powerful media companies on the planet.

We’ve been here before, of course. Super Audio CD and DVD-A didn’t just give us an early earful of highresolution audio on physical media, they also supported multichannel mixes. Sony, Philips and Pioneer were just three big name advocates.

The SACD 5.1 release of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon album is a particularly wonderful listening experience, while the DVD-Audio 5.1 special edition of The Beatles Love (which I picked up in the merch store at the titular Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas) remains as thrilling now as when I first spun it.

And if you think I’ll lend out my treasured copy of Rush’s 2112, in multichannel DVD-Audio, you’d better think again.

But sadly neither formats took off, and are generally considered legacy cul de sacs (although Some might argue there’s still life left in SACD, both from a disc perspective and its DSD download variant).

Which makes the recent announcement by Amazon of an HD tier for its music streaming service particularly exciting. There’s no shortage of High Res music services; Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz all offer soundalike propositions, albeit at a price.

Amazon Music HD undercuts all these. But what really makes it a game-changer is built-in support for Dolby Atmos Music and Sony’s 360 Reality Audio system.

Both offer multichannel HighRes at a level that eclipses those defunct disc formats, and they’ll be available as part of Amazon’s High Res content bouquet.

Amazon Music HD is currently available in the UK, US, Germany, Austria and Japan, but will doubtless roll out to other territories soon. Fingers crossed Australian subscribers to Amazon Music Unlimited won’t have too long to wait.

We’re promised more than 50 million songs in CD quality (16bit/44.1 kHz), and millions more in Ultra High Definition (24bit/192 kHz). It’s not clear yet how much will be available in 3D audio initially (probably not much), but it’s a start.

“Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses,” declared rock icon Neil Young. “This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago.”

He may well be right.

I’ve got to admit, Amazon’s announcement caught me by surprise. But it makes perfect sense when you consider the Echo Studio, Amazon’s new high performance Alexa speaker. This all-in-one features five drivers (a 133mm woofer, 25mm tweeter and three 50mm midrange speakers), driven by a 330W amplifier.

The Echo Studio isn’t just 24-bit capable, its immersive speaker array brings 3D sound to the desktop. Sony demonstrated a similar all-in-one

WE’RE PROMISED MORE THAN 50 MILLION SONGS IN CD QUALITY AND MILLIONS MORE IN ULTRA HIGH DEFINITION.

multi-speaker gizmo at the last CES, and it sounded quite remarkable, so I’m looking forward to hearing what this implementation is like. And of course, the ability to bitstream Dolby Atmos Music into a larger home theatre setup is equally exciting!

Now that Amazon has raised the bar, rival streaming services have little choice but to follow. Spotify has rejected the idea so far (limiting quality to 320 kbps), Apple Music, under the Apple Digital Masters banner, seems ready to jump onboard.

Others are already innovating in their own way. In France, posh audio manufacturer Devialet has already teamed with Qobuz to offer, for a fixed monthly fee and one-off initial payment, a high-end wireless speaker bundled with a CD quality streaming subscription.

And as interest grows, artists and labels will hopefully become incentivised to deliver ever more content in Hi-Res and immersive multichannel, progressively creating a huge catalogue.

The High Resolution Music bandwagon is rolling again. I can’t wait to hear where it takes us.