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What does it mean to have spatial audio on a pair of headphones? I thought spatial audio meant you needed a 5 speaker setup or similar.
Unfortunately, you can't buy it. Only rent.
You can still “buy” albums digitally from Apple, and they are lossless, as they have been for almost-ever. The caveat being that you need a device capable of decoding ALAC files.
Can't wait to listen to 192kHz/24-bit on my AAC Bluetooth AirPods
> Due to the large file sizes and bandwidth needed for Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless Audio, subscribers will need to opt in to the experience. Hi-Res Lossless also requires external equipment, such as a USB digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
> By default, Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, as well as the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple TV seems oddly missing in that list. Edit: If anything is to be expected to be connected to a surround Atmos setup, it would be a TV-room audio-setup. Edit 2: Confirmed supported.
Who knew I would be locked into Spotify not by the music quality, but by playlists, friends, apps using it, and their Discovery mechanisms. Apple and Tidal may have awesome quality, but apps like https://musicleague.app/ have gotten me through Lockdown, and it turns out that these value props are very strong. I always thought I would instantly switch to a service for its audio quality, but then again, I can also buy…
I have audiophile equipment - $900 MSRP Hifiman headphones, discrete DAC and amp - and I tried Tidal to see if I could hear a difference. 99% of the time, I can't... and Tidal's MQA format is questionable anyway. (Not sure about Apple's "ALAC" either.) I used a playlist importer to get my playlists to Tidal, and about 90% of my tracks made it - with some obvious mismatches/songs not found for unclear reasons. (There were also, in fairness, a few songs Tidal did have which the import tool missed.)
But Tidal just doesn't seem to have the radio and discovery features I use to find new music. If I used it, I'd have to constantly sync all my tracks (by paying for an external service) and risk losing some of them, for an audio quality difference that even most audiophiles seem to admit is negligible unless you're in ideal listening conditions with a track you know extremely well.
So even though they're constantly making things worse, I will stick with Spotify for now.
This is honestly quite exciting and I’m actually tempted to use get Apple Music to try this. However, it’s not really clear to me how I can play these tracks. Can I use my existing Dolby Atmos setup? If so, what kind of hardware do I need to connect? Can I use a HDMI dongle for my iPad, for example, to connect it to my receiver? Or is this only an Apple-specific thing that only works on Apple speakers. I’m afraid I a…
There's Dolby Atmos for Mobile Devices[0]. It does require extra processing, so maybe extra hardware, but it's not unique to Apple. [0] https://professional.dolby.com/tv/dolby-atmos-for-mobile-dev...
In terms of art, I'm in a kind of wait-and-see mode. Recordings have been doing simple panning for a long time. Artists already have quite a powerful set of tools for creating a soundstage, but I'm curious to see how they take advantage of an even more sophisticated medium.
At a meta level, what's interesting about this is that, although these standards can be adopted by anyone, Apple is (for now at least) basically verticalizing music production. They can pitch to artists that X% of Apple Music customers have spatial-audio-capable devices, Y% have capable headphones, and they can 'sell' the value of the additional Atmos/spatial production work as a function of a well-defined TAM rather than in a vacuum.
If the art side is actually good, fans have a reason to stay in the Apple ecosystem — to hear a better, more true-to-intent version of the music.
The crux of this is: do these features actually produce innovation in music production that artists and fans agree is a way of elevating the form? If not, it's a dud; if so, Apple has a big head start.
From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…
On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests.
Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones than a compressed version, even 320kbps MP3. A poorly mastered track will be much harder (if not outright impossible) to tell the difference on.
Since most of the music is consumed on headphones, I'm not sure if spatial music will appeal to many. What I would really like to see in purchased music is individual soundtracks for each instrument/vocal (which I can mix as per my taste) and one default mix made as per the producer's taste. This would not only help with music practice, karaoke,
Who knew I would be locked into Spotify not by the music quality, but by playlists, friends, apps using it, and their Discovery mechanisms. Apple and Tidal may have awesome quality, but apps like https://musicleague.app/ have gotten me through Lockdown, and it turns out that these value props are very strong. I always thought I would instantly switch to a service for its audio quality, but then again, I can also buy…
Personally, lossless quality just sounds like a great way to blow through my data caps even faster. I'm sure some will love it, I question whether it's worth the extra bandwidth.