Mate - people can't tell the difference between lossy and lossless on £30,000 speakers in a world class acoustically treated studio. With the best "car stereo" in the entire world, even sat stationary with no road or engine noise you wouldn't be able to hear the difference. So no, you're not - just enjoy ACC via bluetooth its more than enough for your needs (that you've been enjoying for the last 5 years anyway).
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Apple Music Lossless: What Devices are Supported?
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Mate - people can't tell the difference between lossy and lossless on £30,000 speakers in a world class acoustically treated studio. With the best "car stereo" in the entire world, even sat stationary with no road or engine noise you wouldn't be able to hear the difference. So no, you're not - just enjoy ACC via bluetooth its more than enough for your needs (that you've been enjoying for the last 5 years anyway).
I would be willing to bet any amount of money you would fail a blind ABX test of lossless vs. 256kbps AAC if using any stereo equipment in your car.
How can there be three tiers of "lossless" audio? Good, better and best?
Once again we're treated as dodos as Marketingspeak drives the narrative
Once again we're treated as dodos as Marketingspeak drives the narrative
But there are a lot of people who think they can hear the difference. There's no reason not to cater to them.
Not really - Sony's LDAP is the only codec close to allowing even 16bit 44khz ALAC bit-rates and even then it's still 150kbps or so under (tops out at 950kbps, many ALAC files in my library are over 1500kbps) also no Apple device ever, including all Macs, iPads or iOS devices has supported LDAP yet, not many things do. Apple has been AAC since the start.
It surpasses many more expensive DAC's so long as your headphones aren't very high impedance. Peronally I'll take 24/96 downsampled to 24/48 over a badly encoded 320kbps Ogg any day of the week.
Because some of us have been stuck either waiting on Tidal to be released in their respective countries (and are not impressed with the price) or for Spotify Lossless to be released for literally years.
Apple has an opportunity to flip millions of customers to Apple Music with this move as its 1/2 the price.
Just from potential Tidal switchers alone there is 500,000,000 reasons PER MONTH they might do this.
I know that. I was just confused by the article that specifically said USB DAC.
Catering with a free upgrade (whether necessary or not)? I’ll still take it.
Agree - it should just be called improved quality. Same as 720p, 1080p, 4K, 8K... it's all just more data.
I still but songs from the iTunes music store (as well as bandcamp and 7digital) and do not have any interest in substribing to Apple Music streaming device. I sure hope they allow lossless for songs purchased in the iTunes Store, and I would like it if they did something similar to what they did years back when they went from 128k aac to 256k where they allowed you to pay a slight bit of extra money to upgrade your song from 128k to 256k. I would gladly pay to upgrade my 256k aac iTunes Store downloads to ALAC.
Well there isn't three tiers - there's one. All lossless means is that it's in a container that plays back the original audio bits without removing any information from them. It'll play back any bit rate or sample rate. Most record companies won't have masters above 16bit 44khz (because really there is no point, and 95% of electronic producers will only be writing recording at this rate) some live and orchestra stuff will be tracked and recorded higher - if a record label has something up to 24bit 192khz (none of them will, it'll top out at 96khz) then they can release that too. ALAC has always support all of this.
Bro - you might be confusing high res and standard res. Most people can't hear that difference. However, most people absolutely can hear the difference between lossy and lossless, even on mid-grade systems.
Also, pretty bold of you to make assumptions about my car audio setup or listening habits. I have high end speakers and a high end head unit, I drive an electric vehicle so there's no engine noise, and I do most of my listening in my 60-90 minute (depending on traffic) downtime between my two jobs. I'm parked, so no road noise. My head unit plays FLAC and WAV files via USB stick, not bluetooth. When I'm using my iPhone, it's using hardwired CarPlay, not bluetooth.
It certainly does. At least 16bit /44khz, which is CD quality.
But to fair - there's not really any such thing as a badly encoded file these days. You can't really do it wrong.
As a record producer and mastering engineer the only reason I have any music in lossless formats is for archival and storage. If I want to edit or change something you can do what you want with it and not have to re-encode it again, where as compressed formats are the last thing you should get to listen to - like the audio version of a PDF or a JPEG.
But then again lots and lots of records have been made that sample MP3s so.
That’s a terrible reason to not have lossless available on a device that is able to technically play it back.
The press release from Apple states, "Hi-Res Lossless also requires external equipment, such as a USB digital-to-analog converter (DAC)." This reads to me as stating that it will work with optical DACs. I miss the days when most Macs had optical outs built into the headphone jacks, although I'm happy that the TB dock I'm using with my new Mac mini supports optical out.
Apple won't be leaving money on the table where lossless is concerned, they will have new lossless capable audio products to sell us right around the corner.
Listen, as a mix engineer who mixes the records you're listening to, I can confidently say I am not getting them mixed up and I confidently wager £50,000 that you couldn't tell the difference between a FLAC file and a 320kbit MP3 of the same source - so far no one has been able to do - as said, there's an entire blind test on the most detail speakers they could find in a fully audio treated room.
In the greatest respect I drive a Tesla with the premium audio system which has been further enhanced and it's still a million miles away from anything remotely capable of being able to recreate the audio frequencies you can't even hear anyway! As I said, you and neither do I have the best car audio system in the world and even if we did it'd be at the **** end of hi-fi speakers which are at the **** end of studio monitors.
I've got a pair of £1400 Sennheiser HD800s, with a £800 super flat amp to drive them and a £1000 DAC - that combo alone still can't let you hear the difference in compression between a 320kbit MP3 and it's lossless brother, so your car certainly can't - that's why I am able to be bold about my assumptions.
Unfortunately there are still alot of badly encoded files on both Spotify and Apple Music.
You are right though, outside of a very quiet room with decent cans, 99.99% of consumer playback doesn't warrant any more than 256kbps AAC.
There are occasions I can hear artifacts even on decent rips vs an original CD during a listening session which would be nice not to have to deal with .... ever.
Some people want the painting though, not the print, even if the image looks the same when it's mounted on a wall
Yeah, that's what I want to know about. I sent an email to Sonos but no response as yet.
What about Beats Studio3 headphones? They have a headphone jack (no Lightning bs), but are never mentioned.
People believe what they want to believe. (Without being willing to to a real honest blind test - same master, same volume, no knowledge in advance which one is which.) As I've mentioned in another thread, it would have been hilarious if Apple waited three months or so until revealing that their hardware don't benefit of lossless – we would have had so many "Lossless is great, I hear significantly more details, so much better than AAC256!" posts from AirPods users in the meantime. Would have been a good laugh, similar to people who already had bad headaches from new cellular towers in their neighborhood even before they were turned on …
Placebo effect is a hell of a drug.
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