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What's the point of lossless Apple Music?
Lossless audio doesn't work on AirPods, or (as far as I can tell) on any Bluetooth speakers or headphones. Who does Apple think will use this? Or is it just a gimmick that adds an extra bullet point to the feature list?
Speaking of gimmicks. spatial audio sounds like yet another take on quadrophonic audio.
I'm into lossless for using at home, and for making better-quality mix tapes on cassette. I wonder if anyone but nerds and audiophiles will care?
Comments
The point is naturally selling new AirPods that will add support for it and other stuff?!
I would not be surprised if we also get new 'dongles' with a 24-Bit@96K DAC...
Airpods are wireless, so the audio is compressed as it is sent over Bluetooth.
^ this. It makes sense, technically, but it seems crazy that Apple isn't supporting its own hardware. Not even HomePods work, although they stream over Wi-Fi IIRC, so that could change.
Apple’s $549 AirPods Max can’t play lossless Apple Music — even when plugged in
should work fine with the old cheap and cheerful wired earbuds :-/
I'm looking forward to it. I listen to music at work through some powered monitors (little Alesis things). I probably won't notice the difference, but I may as well turn it on. Although that will almost certainly mean having to upgrade to Big Sur. So I will probably be stuck with what I have for the meantime.
Never mind.
At least it's a no cost option. I didn't see that coming.
It's an offering for a niche group of audiophiles to discern themselven in a highly competitive market. If you don't have hardware that supports this, it's probably not for you.
I've done extensive testing and I can't tell the difference between high-bitrate AAC (such as Spotify Premium) and lossless. That's using Sennheiser HD650s, Focal Spirit Pros and some expensive floor standing speakers. I also can't tell the difference between high bitrate AAC and HD Audio such as you get on Tidal or Amazon Music (24/192).
Lower bitrate MP3 and AAC is usually easy to spot, due to the smearing/flanging on the hihats and other inharmonic high-end material, but once you get to 256kbs I simply can no longer hear any difference. Some people can, but you really have to know exactly what to listen for (ie specific artefacts in the encoding).
Anyone who is curious can try for themselves:
http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html
This test is representative of Spotify Premium (and Apple Music) vs lossless:
http://abx.digitalfeed.net/spotify-hq.html
As has been pointed out it's the audio over wireless that's the issue. It's funny how Apple can't win. People complain they're releasing more powerful iPads without the OS or software to take advantage of it...yet. Now they support lossless audio without the portable Apple hardware to take advantage of it fully...yet. This is a way to satisfy audiophiles (who will never be satisfied) and neutralize some competition. Certainly doesn't hurt their image in the current Apple/Epic trial to bump up audio quality and not raise the price.
There’s a lot of snake oil around HD audio. Lossless compression is a different thing: you get what you’d get on a CD with no lossy compression or artefacts, so a lossless FLAC or ALAC is worth having, though high bitrate lossy compression sounds nearly identical to most people. 24/192 can be useful during production, but a finished track using that just ends up with your DAC doing a lot more work processing stuff you can’t hear, and can actually result in worse sound.
My wife listens to this 96 kbps radio stream in the car, it drives me mad that she can't hear the swishy cymbals
@jblock Maybe this signals the return of the wired headphone jack
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Or maybe apple is getting into the $500 per meter speaker cable game.
Interesting roundup of the limitations. No surprises, really.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/18/apple-music-lossless-audio-confusion/
Audiophiles spend a lot of money on gear. So they aren't a trivial market -- while they might be small in number, they spend. This move probably helps get audiophiles to use AppleTVs or their iPads with a decent audio interface as part of their home audio setup.
....
While it is true that lossless renditions often don't sound dramatically different from high quality high bit-rate audio for an awful lot of material even in high-quality listening situations. There are times when the difference is pretty noticeable -- for particular recordings or source material on a high quality playback system in a good listening environment.
If nothing else it's a good first step. And if it leads apple to come up with a way of doing lossless bluetooth streaming, I'm all for it.
Found this today as well:
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-music-lossless/