It’s using exclusive mode, it’s just not setting the playback rate to the sampling rate of the recording. The two are different things. The fact everyone else’s exclusive mode does both, tends to make people conflate the two.
All exclusive mode does is bypass the windows mixer, played samples are still resampled to the application selected output rate.
Amazon music is not passing the music bit perfect, unless you manually set the windows output rate to match the tracks sample rate, that’s absolutely true.
At one point the Qobuz app had a bug where if you selected two tracks with different sampling rates it would play back the first but select the output rate of the second.
Today I started listening to an album with a lossless stream (Amazon HD), and then switched to the same album from a compressed source (Youtube Music - formerly Google Music) half way through. This was after about 2-3 hours of listening to Amazon HD on the HD-600.
Result: Instant brightness, thin body, and my ears started hissing. I wanted to stop within 5 minutes and stopped after 10 minutes.
Compressed vs. lossless sources are not usually distinguishable on my Bluetooth IEMs, and my ears don’t care.
Some songs/albums have been remastered many times. Typically the older, earlier versions (pre 1990s) were softer and don’t clip. In the 1990s the Loudness War began and many releases became progressively louder and more often clipped, with the dynamics flattened out.
During the Loudness War, older content was often remastered in a ham-handed fashion. New releases of the era (circa 1997 to 2010) were extremely loud and can sound awful. Post 2010, reprocessing improved and most compressed versions sound a lot better to my ears.
All of the streaming services lease access to content, and sometimes they get bad editions from the copyright owners. The services also update their libraries over time, so specific titles can improve or get worse over time (per your preferences). Amazon HD sometimes has several remasters of the same music that sound radically different. People who listen in cars and noisy environments often prefer louder, flatter versions than those who listen at home on more resolving systems.
