Kid A Mnesia, Now Streaming in HD!

Kid A Mnesia is Radiohead's first album in several years. A triple disc set, the first two discs are re-releases of Kid A and Amnesia. Both albums are among my favorite Radiohead albums. They were the beginning of when things started to get weird, when Radiohead went from a mellow 90s grunge rock band to whatever you would call the music on these albums. It's somewhat difficult to define in words, but fantastically weird comes to mind. Kid A was my introduction to the band, which I like a lot, but of the two albums I like Amnesia even more. The third disc contains new music. Some of the songs are new versions of previous songs on the albums, while others are brand new. I'd say its pretty good overall, definitely worth a listen if you're a Radiohead fan.

I became interested in music at the end of the cassette tape era. I had a small tape collection, most of which was given to me by my uncle. Mix tapes were a big deal as well. I lived through the entirety of the CD era, and had a fairly large CD collection, including a 200 disc CD changer. Entering the MP3 era, we sacrificed quality for quantity, free quantity at that. For the first time, I had access to essentially any song I could think of for free. At the time, I had a PC connected to dial-up internet, connected to a component stereo through a mini-plug that could go loud enough to shake the house. A song would take a half an hour to download, and the quality of music was pretty bad, especially at higher volume levels. Somewhat recently, 2018 I think, I advanced to listening to music through a paid streaming service. There was hesitation on my part because such services lack any form of ownership. As someone who used to have 100s of CDs and thousands of MP3s, it was a bit difficult to wrap my mind around the idea of listening to music without owning anything. The benefits of having access to millions of songs far outweighs those concerns, and eventually I decided to pay for the service, which I am glad that I did.

I bring all of this up for one simple reason. A few weeks ago, Amazon Music Unlimited started playing most of their music in HD or Ultra HD. I had to look this up to determine what it meant. Essentially, HD is equivalent to CD quality, and Ultra HD is even better quality. Living in multiple eras of music consumption, I've experienced the pros and cons of all types of music media. I can say without question that I haven't listened to music on any media that sounds as good as the compact disc. The sound is so rich and full, especially when listening on a nicer stereo at higher volumes. One of the big drawbacks of streaming is that it is typically a compressed music file. I don't usually notice this when listening at lower volumes or on simple speakers, but when you stream it to a larger stereo it just doesn't pack the punch of a CD. You'd have to turn the volume up louder to achieve the same sound levels and typically the poor sound quality stands out. That's why when they made the announcement about streaming in CD quality (or better), I was super excited to return to the era of CD-quality sound. Now I get the best of both worlds, in terms of CD quality and streaming's large music library.