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

[foodfiend]

I think it became obvious when they dropped the optical connection in the headphone jack. No user demand, apparently...

[foodfiend]

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.

[foodfiend]

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).

[foodfiend]

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.

[foodfiend]

54 minutes ago, Decodering said:

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.

Not for as long as the music labels prevent Apple from selling Red Book quality ALAC in the iTunes store. It would not make any commercial sense, since it would slap itself in the face by saying ALAC is better than AAC, but not have any ALAC available in the iTunes Store or available for streaming via Apple Music. However, that does not mean that the larger hardware eco-system should use AAC as the de facto standard and start dismantling any high-fidelity hardware support. iPods and iPhones only support 16/44.1 and 16/48 music, whatever the file format, but it would be really a move backwards to then strip the ability of the computers to handle higher resolutions.

[foodfiend]

6 minutes ago, Decodering said:

If the labels are really the culprit behind the lack of Redbook quality playback (if something verifiable has been published to that effect, I'd be interested in seeing it), I highly doubt Apple couldn't negotiate ALAC as a distribution standard.

When Apple launched iTunes back in 2007, music was in 128 kbps AAC. Then came iTunes Plus - 256 kbps AAC, available from only EMI and some independent labels (not Sony or Warner Music). Then in 2009, the whole music store moved to 256 kbps AAC. The evolution of what was available in iTunes Plus to the general availability of 256 kbps AAC shows the power of the music labels in licensing deals.

 

Not sure if it is still 100% accurate, but the music labels still have a lot of power. With the sales of downloads falling, I am not sure if Apple will be too bothered about this anyway. They would just focus on growing Apple Music.

[foodfiend]

6 minutes ago, unbalanced output said:

Imho also the iPod 6 was a step down from the 5/5.5 in terms of audio quality.

That was a change in DAC chip. In the iPhone 7, the really tragic fact is that a better DAC sits in the phone for the speakers, but cannot output to analogue headphones without the headphone jack. Instead, we are saddled with the poorer DAC on the adapter, or to use Bluetooth (with its limitations) for wireless transfer.

[foodfiend]

2 minutes ago, Decodering said:

I agree with your thoughts on Apple Music. It's just that Apple could focus on that AND improve the quality of playback with no downside and lots of feel-good marketing benefits.

Well, if everyone streams and stops having AAC/mp3/ALAC copies of music, the real happy people will be the cellphone companies! As far as I know, there are no real unlimited data plans for the mobile Internet, so there is still the pressure to keep files small while offering decent audio quality.

 

Let us remember that Apple is now primarily an i-Device company, rather than a computer company. So most of their $ would go to support the mobile segment. iDevices are still quite constrained in storage (since there is no ready expansion option), which is another argument to support compressed lossy formats, like AAC.

 

In the computer market, especially the desktop market, many people have unlimited data plans, and streaming music over the Internet is easy over ADSL, cable or fibre. HDDs are also cheap. So here is where the ALAC argument holds well.

[foodfiend]

3 minutes ago, unbalanced output said:

That's a very weird arrangement - the quality of the audio through the speakers is anyway objectionable to be polite.

Tragic, but altogether true fact!

[foodfiend]

4 hours ago, Jay-dub said:

You can still use the camera adapter to connect it to almost any USB DAC, can't you? That's an acceptable situation, IMO.

Question: How many USB DACs are available for a mobile solution? Audioquest Dragonfly, Chord MoJo, Arcam Music Boost, Res? There are very few options, and most are originally targeted at being used on a laptop computer instead of a mobile phone.

 

If what Apple's marketing speak is true, they removed the headphone jack because they believe that wireless headphones are the future. However, the support for wireless is then reduced to AAC over Bluetooth, and no support for lossless or Hi-Res music. Considering how popular the AirPod's are, it seems that the majority of people are blissfully unaware of the limitations with the implementation, and rather listen to poorer quality audio (if they even know that) and look cool.

 

I guess that I am just one of the few people who actually stores music as ALAC on my iPhone, so I really would appreciate a lossless option, besides using a convoluted solution of iPhone to adapter to DAC to headphone. That solution is so clumsy that it looks like an accident waiting to happen when you are walking around, or on your daily commute.

[foodfiend]

8 hours ago, Musicophile said:

FYI, I noticed that the 48khz limitation only applies to the headphone output.

 

I guess the 96khz works for the internal speaker.

This is hilarious! As if the internal speakers will ever yield better sound quality that what you can potentially get through your headphones!

 

This is kind of like the iPhone 7 with the higher spec'ed DAC that is in the phone linked to the speaker, and the lower spec'ed DAC that is in the adapter for the headphones. I suppose Apple will argue that not everyone uses the adapter, but almost everyone uses the speaker (for the click sounds when you use the UI).