Depending on who you ask, not everyone can tell the difference between 16-bit/44.1 kHz and 24-bit/48 kHz or higher. It’s also much easier to tell when you're listening to Dolby Atmos Music versus a regular track. Instruments, vocals and other sounds are placed around the users to give a sense you’re “inside” of the music. Where lossless is primarily concerned with quality, spatial audio creates perceived depth and nuance using location data. This spatial audio option will work on all AirPods models and Beats headphones that are equipped with an H1 or W1 chip. The other part of Apple’s music news this week, and what I’d argue is the more significant item, is that Apple Music will support Dolby Atmos next month as well. Both of those can be used with an iPhone, iPad or Mac in order to stream lossless content. Instead, lossless is reserved for Apple Music users who have a DAC or wired headphones capable of handling increased bit depth and sample rates. You can absolutely open up the settings and turn on lossless with AirPods over Bluetooth, but that’s not what the company recommends. Neither will HomePod, though it would be more feasible to update a WiFi speaker to support ALAC in the future. The company also explained that even if you use a Lightning cable for a wired connection on the AirPods Max, the headphones still won’t accurately reproduce the higher-quality tunes. The issue is with Bluetooth on the whole, and even Sony’s LDAC codec, which offers a far higher bitrate than AAC, still isn’t lossless.Īpple confirmed to Engadget that neither AirPods, AirPods Pro nor AirPods Max will work with the upcoming lossless streaming in Apple Music. AAC doesn’t account for this, and since the codec is what Apple relies on for Bluetooth compression on all AirPods models, those devices aren’t capable of lossless audio. In other words, CD-quality 16-bit audio is going to have less detail (albeit subtly) than super high-res 24 bit. A higher bit depth captures and reproduces the original recorded audio more accurately. I could go into a ton of even more confusing detail on this, but you can think of bit depth as what determines the dynamic range of an audio signal. A higher sample rate increases overall quality, but the AAC codec doesn’t have bit depth, which is the other half of the lossless equation. Some codecs allow for higher data rates, but overall, they’re still compressing the audio to get it across the wireless connection and losing quality in the process.ĪAC does offer higher sample rates than MP3, or the number of times the signal is sampled per second. AAC was co-developed by several companies to be the successor to the MP3, but with higher sound quality at the same bit rate. There are plenty of these, but AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is what Apple uses to stream from Apple Music versus ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) for lossless. The tech makes the audio “lossy” during this process, named for the data lost for the sake of reducing file size. Bluetooth devices employ codecs (literally short for compression/decompression), algorithms that squash the signal down to a size that’s manageable to send over a wireless connection. This means they rely on Bluetooth to connect to your phone, tablet or computer. Apple’s premium $550 headphones should be able to stream CD-quality audio, right? Well, it’s easy to attempt that argument based on price, but the AirPods Max are first and foremost a set of wireless headphones. This is an especially convoluted issue when you consider the AirPods Max. What Apple wasn’t explicit about in its initial announcement is that, at launch, none of its headphones and speakers will work with the lossless streaming that’s coming to its entire music library of 75 million songs. The company is clear that the latter is for “the true audiophile” and requires extra equipment - like an external USB DAC (digital-to-analog converter) for you to stream at such high quality. The higher-quality streaming option will bring CD-quality music at 16-bit/44.1 kHz on up to Hi-Resolution Lossless at 24-bit/192kHz. This week, Apple officially announced what had been rumored for a few weeks: lossless audio quality is coming to Apple Music.
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