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New Macbook Pro 15 inch touch bar 2017 - internal DAC only 48khz?


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I just received my brand new MacBook Pro 15 inch with touch bar, and installed Audirvana as one of the first apps.

 

I was surprised when A+ told me that the max sample rate the computer can play is 48khz (without any external Dac obviously). 

 

I haven't used a Mac without an external Dac for very long, and I´m aware the internal Dac is a 50ct afterthought. However, is it just the newest generation that has such a limited feature set? I seem to remember that older Macs used to play up to 96khz?

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12 hours ago, NOMBEDES said:

No surprise.  Apple hates music, and the only thing they hate worse than music is Audiophiles.

I don't think Apple hates music and audiophiles -- they just see music playback and delivery differently than audiophiles do.

 

Yes, Apple frustrates me with their dacs (especially on the iPhone) and iTunes (specifically the inability to natively and easily transfer 24/96 files to said iPhone). And I think their disregard for audio formats in anything above 256 AAC is bewildering, which I think speaks more to them resting on their laurels instead of truly "innovating" on that front. I sometimes think about switching allegiances (platforms) because their focus is often not on audio issues important to me.

 

But to say that Apple hates music is a gross overgeneralisation. Unfortunately, there are just not the options important to audiophiles that can all be found in Apple's universe.

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1 hour ago, Decodering said:

And I think their disregard for audio formats in anything above 256 AAC is bewildering, which I think speaks more to them resting on their laurels instead of truly "innovating" on that front.

It is just protecting their iTunes Store. I doubt Apple will support lossless or hi-res in their core systems any time soon, unless the major music labels allow them to sell lossless and hi-res.

 

At the same time, Apple will continue to allow add-ons to attach DACs to iPhones and Macs, and players like BitPerfect, which they consider a niche market. ALAC and AIFF file formats also allow hi-res music.

 

I think that the majority of Mac-users do not use Mac internal audio beyond 16/44.1. Audio professionals as well as audiophiles may prefer to use external components for these purposes. Most audiophiles who are Mac-users attach an external USB DAC using music playback programmes like BitPerfect, Audirvana, Amarra, etc., which allows for hi-res music playback.

 

Yes, it is an over-generalisation of the market, but this has been the direction under Tim Cook (which I am not too happy about). To sum their concept: Put the no-frills on board, and let other add-ons be external and at additional cost (and inconvenience). That has been a big departure from the early days of the Mac, which was always ground-breaking.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions...

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2 hours ago, Decodering said:

I don't think Apple hates music and audiophiles -- they just see music playback and delivery differently than audiophiles do.

 

I think their disregard for audio formats in anything above 256 AAC is bewildering, which I think speaks more to them resting on their laurels instead of truly "innovating" on that front.

 

Not entirely true. iTunes supports 320VBR and AIFF, which Apple developed in 1988. I like AIFF, because it works on nearly all platforms and audio software, including HQPlayer, Audacity, TT DR Offline Meter, etc.

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21 hours ago, wwaldmanfan said:

 

Not entirely true. iTunes supports 320VBR and AIFF, which Apple developed in 1988. I like AIFF, because it works on nearly all platforms and audio software, including HQPlayer, Audacity, TT DR Offline Meter, etc.

You're right about AIFF; the support is generally fine and the music files sound good. The only problem I find with files created in AIFF format are the 24/96 files that iTunes won't transfer to my iPhone, which is the limit to which I was referring in my post. Having to manually transfer them in a separate step after using the super-handy wireless syncing function is just a (small) frustration.

 

Another thing I don't get about iTunes (Apple) is why there is still no option for iTunes to automatically convert files to ALAC when transferring to an iDevice. Even after all these years and all the gains in storage capacity, one still can't have iTunes automatically create ALAC files when copying files. 256 AAC files are still the best one can hope for. Again, it just shows that Apple has its own ideas about music playback that don't match up with audiohphile expectations and use cases.

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17 hours ago, NOMBEDES said:

@Decodering:

 

I am guessing that "hate" is too strong a word, maybe our Apple audio engineers are just dead souls.

 

References:

 

1. NOMBE'S BLOG, COMPUTER AUDIOPHILE (reprinted in full for your enjoyment) (infra)

2. The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han

3. The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom

4.  Is Modern Love Endangered?  The Weekly Standard, Tim Markatos

5.  Allan Bloom's Souls Without Longing, All Grown up.  Public Discourse, The Witherspoon Institute, Peter Augustine Lawler

 

Our techno overlords at Facebook, Google, Apple et al, are, as described by Bloom are " [souls] racked with longing and hunger for something they know not how to name."  Love and by extension music are alien to them.  As Peter Augustine Lawler comments in the"souls without longing" article, Not only is love alien to them but  "any form of heart-enlarging experience that would threaten one's independence and survival.  They are, deep down, social solitaries."

 

So when you wonder why an IOS update had made your DAC scrap, reflect that they do not love anything (maybe code?)  and they have barren souls which cannot love music.   Further, the recent 10 page screed by the former Google engineer,  James Damore,  indicates no love for women either.  

 

NOMBE'S BLOG POST:

 

Apple hates audiophiles.  They have made Billions off of iTunes, but deep down inside their cold, code driven hearts they hate us.  They are bloodless, they don't enjoy music except as an entry on their accounts receivable ledger. They don't enjoy sex because it can't be monetized in a family-friendly environment.  Every update that is spewed from Cupertino is just an excuse to damage the free flow of music through our assorted DACs.  One update kills W4S DAC-2, the next update is unwittingly targeted against some other innocent.

 

A History:  (This is a true story.....in respect for the dead the names have been changed.  In respect for the living the story is represented as true)

 

Jane graduates from CalTech.  She is smart, she received excellent grades and she is very technically adept, she can code with the best of them.  She did the right internships, checked all the boxes with the right professors and mentors.  She applied to several tech companies and, upon graduation, she accepted a job at Apple.

 

Jane's first assignment at Apple is to work on OS X whatever.  The new update to the existing operating system.

Now she is on her own.  As a junior member of the team, she knows she must contribute something.  Even if the customer has no need or desire for an upgrade, Jane has to change something, improve something, do something to justify her employment.

 

Well multiply Jane by 1001 and you get the picture.  Young engineers and coders who have never heard of Miles Davis, who think music is some thin screech supported by a computer generated bass line emitting from a .27cent ear bud and you can see why the so called updates to our operating systems are, for the audiophile, much more trouble than they are worth.

 

 

I totally get what you're saying; still, I think the issue is that there are just overriding considerations at Apple that take precedence over audiophile preferences.

 

To me, it falls under the category of Apple's frustrating channeling of all their energy to creating products and services that, at the end of the day, don't really take more advanced users into consideration. The years-long drought of true pro-level hardware, middling and sometimes dumbed-down software, and a general tendency to iterate when, in the past, the company would have been more daring tell me that the focus is on middle-of-the-road solutions and leaving just enough wiggle room for people looking to push the limits of the system to tinker.

 

Creating a music reproduction environment that moves people beyond what was innovative a decade or so ago doesn't seem to be a huge draw for Apple. (As an aside, I'm keen to hear the upcoming HomePod.) And, yes, it clashes with the oft-repeated "music is in our DNA" spiel. But I take it as Apple directing its ressources to reach other ends than responding to audiophile expectations.

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3 hours ago, Decodering said:

You're right about AIFF; the support is generally fine and the music files sound good. The only problem I find with files created in AIFF format are the 24/96 files that iTunes won't transfer to my iPhone, which is the limit to which I was referring in my post. Having to manually transfer them in a separate step after using the super-handy wireless syncing function is just a (small) frustration.

 

Another thing I don't get about iTunes (Apple) is why there is still no option for iTunes to automatically convert files to ALAC when transferring to an iDevice. Even after all these years and all the gains in storage capacity, one still can't have iTunes automatically create ALAC files when copying files. 256 AAC files are still the best one can hope for. Again, it just shows that Apple has its own ideas about music playback that don't match up with audiohphile expectations and use cases.

Hi-res is a niche market. You can't expect Apple to care about this. PONO, who sold a very sophisticated portable player, and also offered a catalog of hi-res popular music, failed, presumably from a lack of customers.

 

The iPhone is not sold as a hi-res music storage player. For one thing, they don't have the capacity, except for top-of-the-line models. The analog SQ is famously bad with headphones.

I used to have a 160GB iPod Classic, but it died, so I picked up a 16GB iPod Nano for my car, and for air travel with my Bose headphones. The I have 120 albums on the Nano at 320kbps.

 

iTunes offers options for what you want to do, they just take an extra step or two. You can set the import prefs to whatever you want, 320kbps, redbook, ALAC, 16/48 AIFF ot WAV. Then, just select and duplicate the files you want to transcode. Display the library in song mode > sort by bit rate or kind > drag & drop the new files into your iPhone

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On 8/11/2017 at 2:20 PM, NOMBEDES said:

No surprise.  Apple hates music, and the only thing they hate worse than music is Audiophiles.

 

Really.  The company that created iTunes and iTunes Music,  the iPod, got rid of DRM, upped the resolution and started with AAC and created Mastered for iTunes somehow they hate music.

As to audiophiles they have no reason to care nor should they as a mass market company.  Do all the streaming services "hate" music too?

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On 8/12/2017 at 5:22 AM, foodfiend said:

That has been a big departure from the early days of the Mac, which was always ground-breaking.

 

Either you are indulging in revisionist history or you weren't around for the early days.

I started with the 128k Mac and my latest Mac's are a 2017 15-inch Mac both at home and for work.

There were plenty of stumbles along the way by Apple with the Mac including under Steve Jobs.

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3 hours ago, DarwinOSX said:

 

Really.  The company that created iTunes and iTunes Music,  the iPod, got rid of DRM, upped the resolution and started with AAC and created Mastered for iTunes somehow they hate music.

As to audiophiles they have no reason to care nor should they as a mass market company.  Do all the streaming services "hate" music too?

 

I guess you missed the strike out on the word hate.  

 

The company that created iTunes etc.....  Can't do an update without knocking quite a few DACs off line.  

Good point about audiophiles not having to care about a mass market company.  I get it.  But there are a lot of folks, call them, near audiophiles, who do use IOS X, and find themselves high and dry when the operating system is  "improved".

In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake ~ Sayre's Law

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On 8/14/2017 at 8:56 PM, DarwinOSX said:

 

Either you are indulging in revisionist history or you weren't around for the early days.

I started with the 128k Mac and my latest Mac's are a 2017 15-inch Mac both at home and for work.

There were plenty of stumbles along the way by Apple with the Mac including under Steve Jobs.

Read the post in entirety and not quote only a snippet that can be misleading. Apple was almost always two-steps ahead of the general PC crowd, from the use of the GUI, to laser printers, Photoshop and PageMaker (programmes that got Adobe where it is today started on the Mac). Somehow, they were much better at predicting trends, albeit some times they were too much ahead of their time. Even the death of items like the floppy drive, and the optical discs, and the move from HDD to SSD, were well predicted by Apple.

 

Even though Apple chose many independent protocols, like IEEE1394 (Firewire), I actually believe that IEEE1394 is superior to USB. A huge pro music-related ecosystem developed around IEEE1394, until it was effectively killed.

 

Mistakes? A great many were made during the period when Sculley ousted Jobs from Apple, which included Mac Clones, and the ill-fated AIM Alliance.

 

In recent years, Apple has been alienating its pro users a lot. From the horrible "Trash Can" Mac Pro, to dropping Aperture, etc. While Apple has grown exponentially as a company (with the biggest cash hoard for acquisition), it has also become more and more consumer and mass-market focused. There are few traces of their roots in the professional creative arena left (from design and art, to photography, publishing, music and video).

 

One funny move was to drop the headphone socket from the iPhone 7. The included adapter in the iPhone 7 kit contains a poorer DAC than the internal DAC (which is still used for the speakers), and cripples wireless headphones by not adopting aptX. Meanwhile, external DAC solutions are few and far between, with most being plug-gap solutions actually designed for PCs (Audioquest Dragonfly's need the lightning to USB adaptor).

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions...

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On 8/14/2017 at 9:22 AM, NOMBEDES said:

 

I guess you missed the strike out on the word hate.  

 

The company that created iTunes etc.....  Can't do an update without knocking quite a few DACs off line.  

Good point about audiophiles not having to care about a mass market company.  I get it.  But there are a lot of folks, call them, near audiophiles, who do use IOS X, and find themselves high and dry when the operating system is  "improved".

 

It is not Apple job to support every possible device out there.  it would be impossible for one thing.  It is the device manufacturers job to get the beta's of new version and test their product with it.

Plus you are exaggerating how often this happens.

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3 hours ago, foodfiend said:

Read the post in entirety and not quote only a snippet that can be misleading. Apple was almost always two-steps ahead of the general PC crowd, from the use of the GUI, to laser printers, Photoshop and PageMaker (programmes that got Adobe where it is today started on the Mac). Somehow, they were much better at predicting trends, albeit some times they were too much ahead of their time. Even the death of items like the floppy drive, and the optical discs, and the move from HDD to SSD, were well predicted by Apple.

 

Even though Apple chose many independent protocols, like IEEE1394 (Firewire), I actually believe that IEEE1394 is superior to USB. A huge pro music-related ecosystem developed around IEEE1394, until it was effectively killed.

 

Mistakes? A great many were made during the period when Sculley ousted Jobs from Apple, which included Mac Clones, and the ill-fated AIM Alliance.

 

In recent years, Apple has been alienating its pro users a lot. From the horrible "Trash Can" Mac Pro, to dropping Aperture, etc. While Apple has grown exponentially as a company (with the biggest cash hoard for acquisition), it has also become more and more consumer and mass-market focused. There are few traces of their roots in the professional creative arena left (from design and art, to photography, publishing, music and video).

 

One funny move was to drop the headphone socket from the iPhone 7. The included adapter in the iPhone 7 kit contains a poorer DAC than the internal DAC (which is still used for the speakers), and cripples wireless headphones by not adopting aptX. Meanwhile, external DAC solutions are few and far between, with most being plug-gap solutions actually designed for PCs (Audioquest Dragonfly's need the lightning to USB adaptor).

 

It is nonsensical for you to think I somehow read one sentence out of everything you wrote.  Since you want to see your words over again here you are.

I'm as big a Mac fan as you can find but there is no way it was "always ground breaking" under Jobs or anyone else.  Steve Jobs made plenty of mistakes with the Mac and he said so.  I owned some of them.

Firewire is better than which version of USB?  I've had Firewire devices 400 and 800  in the past.  It died for good reason and Apple was smart enough to pull the plug when it made sense.  Thunderbolt was a great replacement and faster, more reliable and flexible than Firewire.  We are now on TB 3.

Profits are up dramatically under Tim Cook which is the purpose of a corporation not to cater to markets that are low profit margin.  Besides, they heard the complaints and are doing something about it.

Apple was always mass market focused.  They were never interested in catering to a niche group.  It's just that they have been succeeding at being mass market.  Their profits these days are far and away because of the iPhone so that is where they focus.  

So you like that they introduced all the new technologies in the past or made them mainstream but not some current changes. You can't have it both ways.  For every innovation you liked some people didn't like. 

Apple supports AAC instead of AptX which is just as good.  The companies that support AAC, like Sony, have no issues.  

It is not Apple's job to make laptops that work with every device out there.  Trying to do so leads to mediocrity and is certainly true for very niche devices like DAC's.

Creatives and other Pro's still use Mac's overwhelmingly and that isn't going to change. and corporations buy Macs now by the thousands which they didn't in the past.

 

 

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36 minutes ago, DarwinOSX said:

Firewire is better than which version of USB?  I've had Firewire devices 400 and 800  in the past.  It died for good reason and Apple was smart enough to pull the plug when it made sense.  Thunderbolt was a great replacement and faster, more reliable and flexible than Firewire.  We are now on TB 3.

If you look at sustained data transfer of !EEE1394, they did much better than the USB devices of the era. The lack of adoption had nothing to do with the fact that it was poor technology, but rather, the poor licensing model. Thunderbolt? Yes, it came as a replacement for Firewire, and is a faster technology, but versus traditional USB? Come on, IEEE1394a had 400 Mbit/s throughput, then USB 1.0 was at 1.5 Mbit/s. By the time USB 2.0 came in promising 480 Mbit/s, IEEE1394b had 800 Mbit/s! Many tests also showed that even IEEE1394a had better sustained transfer rates than USB 2.0.

 

Trust me, I have also lived through the monochrome 1-box Macintoshes, the PowerPC era, and the more recent Intel-based units. I can remember them rolling out the StyleWriter (I had one of them too), way before bubble-jet or ink-jet became mainstream.

 

The original user base of the Macintosh (besides the Education market), was the professional creative user. This area was almost exclusively Macintosh, due to the LaserWriter, PageMaker and PhotoShop, unless you had more intensive demands on CPU for ray-tracing, etc. and ended up on Silicon Graphics. While Apple has managed to retain some of this market, it is no longer exclusively Apple's like in the past. This is the group of users that are most cheesed-off for being abandoned by Apple, after years of loyalty. Tim Cook's direction is a one-size-fits-all mentality, which is only going to alienate pro-users. The "Trashcan" Mac Pro was case and point, and Apple had to back-paddle on it.

 

As for your argument about AAC, there is no doubt that AAC trumps mp3 as a more modern technology (I am using ALAC, which is still superior to AAC for audio-quality). However, I am talking about data transfer via Bluetooth for music. Apple, in the iPhone 7, still uses traditional and crippled Bluetooth for that data transfer to any wireless headphones, with no option of using aptX Lossless. So, it depends on you to first process the file into a 16/44.1 or 16/48 AAC file before playback. This limits the iPhone 7 to the reproduction of AAC lossy music with a pseudo-Redbook quality. aptX Lossless supports HD audio up to 24-bit at 96 kHz.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions...

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I've thought back to the OP's topic of whether Apple snuck in an inferior DAC in the new MBP that maxes out at 16/48; if really true, it is a step back for no real reason that benefits audiophiles. And that, to me, is the subtext of the original comment, since this an audiophile site.

 

That's what makes using Apple products frustrating occasionally for my case use (and presumably that of others here). There just don't seem to be any technical reasons to focus on music reproduction that relies on inferior music formats. In the near past, small storage size and less-than-robust wireless transfer protocols meant that Apple had to be careful about its choices in order to ensure smooth reproduction for millions of people. Today, iDevices come with more space, and wireless transfer is basically solved. But Apple doesn't seem to want to push just a little bit to take advantage of these advances and consequently push the fidelity of music reproduction to a higher level.

 

The company doesn't have to go as far as supporting DSD and other niche-within-a-niche formats and such. But it could so easily build its ecosystem around CD-quality playback. At the very least, it could decide that ALAC is the new lowest common denominator and leave AAC in the same dustbin as many of the other technologies it's ditched over the years. Apple is in a position to explain to millions and millions of people why music fidelity is important and act to show people the difference. It just doesn't seem interested in doing so.

 

I'm not saying Apple is bad for the decisions it makes (I still am a fanboy, after all), but it seems like a missed opportunity for everyone involved -- customers/music lovers, the artists, and the company. Also, for a company that sells premium-priced devices, those choses dim a little of lustre they could have.

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