Article: Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res Mess

[Sevenfeet]

1 hour ago, agladstone said:

This is a real disappointment! 
Seems like it’s more of a marketing ploy vs actually commitment and dedication for Apple to actually bring HiRes and lossless to the masses. 
They may realize 99% of their customers won’t realize the difference on their AirPods or tiny Bluetooth wireless speakers anyhow? 
So now Apple and Amazon can market to the masses “we play music in HD”, yet in reality, neither service is actually useful or fully operational in a system that can actually play bit perfect HiRes and Lossless audio, but the 99% of both of these giants customers will never even know or understand the difference because they all lack the ability to play audio at that level anyhow. 
The real negative (in my opinion) to this situation, is that Apple and Amazon will (or already have) captured so much of the consumer market that this will put real pressure on Qobuz and Tidal sales and memberships and subscription fees, that they may have a very difficult time staying in business in the long run? 

 

I chose to look at this as "glass half full". The fact that we have lossless and hires lossless at all is a huge win, even though that we don't have things like rate switching on MacOS or the holy grail of bit perfect communication. We have been waiting for this for many years. Auto rate switching has worked on iOS for many years now....it's just not been a priority on the Mac. I'm sure if this group is politely loud enough that we might get that feature. But there also has to be a legacy reason as to why CoreAudio on the Mac with the Audio Mini app works the way it does. There are still a fair amount of professional music apps that depend on this thing and you don't want to break it just because of needy audiophiles. :) So yes, some more bugs to fix but we're very close now.

 

One more thing I did notice....if you have chosen "HiRes Lossless" in Mac Apple Music preferences, then play through to an Airplay endpoint, it obviously won't stuff a 24 bit/48khz+ file down that pipe since I don't think it works (yet). But Apple Music instead of downrezzing the sound to 16/44.1, it instead gets the lossy AAC version and upsamples it to 16/44.1. This is a little strange since Apple Music/iTunes has been downrezzing HiRes ALAC stored in iTunes databases for many years now when Airplay is the destination.

[Sevenfeet]

3 hours ago, ted_b said:

I've not tested any of this, but for us multichannel fans the new benefit of Apple Music is the lossless Atmos releases.....and especially a VERY rare one indeed..Sgt Pepper!!  Dolby and Apple Ltd (not Apple Music) used an unreleased version of Sgt Pepper to demo Atmos a few years ago, but it never reached release status.   Now the folks on the Quad forum are saying that, indeed, Sgt Pepper is streaming in Atmos!!  Whether it's the same mix, that is currently undetermined (strangely enough, the arguably greatest Beatle song ever, Pepper's closing track, A Day In The Life, is NOT in Atmos).  Apple TV box required.

 

There's another unicorn recording out there I'm dying to hear again. There is an unreleased multichannel version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller". I got a chance to sample it briefly when on a tour of one of Nashville's pre-eminent recording studios. Sadly, i don't have my own copy.