sites that sell MP3s, and audio quality

[darkoshi]

This is a follow-up to my entry about Amazon's MP3 sales interface.

After making that post, I had found this thread:
Has Amazon stopped allowing the 30second sampling of digital music?
One person commented:

"I just got off an Amazon chat with a member of the "dedicated team working on this." Shine wrote, "We haven't removed it permanently. It will be back soon. It has been temporarily removed as our website is getting redesigned in a better way. So, we can expect that option of playing sample music very soon."

Now today I see that the functionality is back again. Amazon's digital music pages let you preview the songs. There are also links again for buying the albums and individual songs. But there's no mention of adding songs to a cart. So I'm not sure yet if the MP3 cart functionality is still there, or if it only lets you buy and download one item at a time.

.

If everything else were the same, I'd prefer buying MP3s somewhere other than Amazon. When music is available on bandcamp, I get it from there as Bandcamp is known to give artists a good deal. And I had found that 7digital is an alternative to Amazon for a lot of the music that isn't available on bandcamp.

But now I'm not sure if the MP3 quality is the same for Amazon vs 7digital.

For this same song from the same album, the Amazon sample sounds much better to me than the 7digital sample:
https://www.amazon.com/Theme-Mysterious-Cities-Gold/dp/B006ITBSE4/
https://us.7digital.com/artist/london-music-works/release/music-for-big-kids-1523739


I've previously determined that I don't need super-duper quality sound files, as I struggle to notice any difference between MP3s encoded at V2 and V9. So if I can tell a difference in the above samples, the worse one must be really bad quality.

But maybe the quality is only bad on the sample, and not on the actual file you get to download. I wonder, and might buy one just to find out.