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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

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Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#211

Post by rektide »

Semi-worth pointing out that Google has done a couple spatial audio/ambisonics things over the years. The seemingly-abandoned VR initiative has/had spatial audio[1], provided by the open source Resonance Audio[2] library they open sourced, Omnitone for spatial audio on the web[3]. Omnitone dates back to 2016[4]!

Not nearly the follow through/uptake. As usual I part blame Google, but in large part, it's just hard to get adoption of good tech!! Both from consumers, but more so, the 3rd party software market.

In general, I'm more excited for computational audio's potential to combine let's say "ad hoc" arrangements of speakers, for it's ability to acoustically map out rooms & deliberately create sound fields, than I am these kind of top down, high control systems like Atmos or VR where a heavily constrained, normalized set of speakers is used to recreate one specific audio experience. It feels like we're at 3D VR concert again, where you get to stand in one spot & look around. Immersive, so long as you are ok taking the role of a frozen obelisk in the scene.

[1] https://developers.google.com/vr/discover/spatial-audio

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWbaEr_mXRE

[3] https://googlechrome.github.io/omnitone/

[4] https://audioxpress.com/article/google-discovers-ambisonics-...

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#212

Post by swiley »

cies wrote: post #23

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…

IME: you get quantitation error with very quiet sounds (or dark things in video) which gets amplified by the lossy encodings. It's not normally apparent but there are cases where it is.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#213

Post by tarsinge »

Someone1234 wrote: post #69
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". 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…

> I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. I, too, run high-end gear and cannot. The problem scope isn't simply reproduction accuracy, it is also one of taste: Different compression can elevate/alter parts of the sound, and your opinion may not lean to the highest bit rate but rather some other coloring of the music. The fact you've run this test "repeatedly" actually hur…

MP3 compression is not the same thing has compression the audio effect. Compressed music in the effect sense can be enjoyable and is a matter of taste, but hearable MP3 compression artifacts is nearly always crap.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#216

Post by vr46 »

ivraatiems wrote: post #35
vr46 wrote: post #12

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…

Agreed - Spotify's UI is bad and getting worse, and its quality is meh, but its discovery features are top notch and it has the biggest catalog. 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 impo…

I run Spotify Connect through a Naim Uniti, but I don’t have Tidal support yet. I did test through headphones - Grado - and tried to correct for volume level, but my conclusion was just that they sound slightly different, but not objectively better/worse. I am pleased to hear that others seem to feel the same, as it makes it easier to ignore the competing streaming race and get back to the music…

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#217

Post by kevindong »

marcodiego wrote: post #112
cies wrote: post #23

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…

Personal experience: most people can not differentiate anything above 128kbps mp3. Some can, but don't care. A lot of people listen to music in noisy environments with lower quality blue-tooth devices that decrease audio quality even more and make it way harder to differentiate from anything better than 128kbps mp3. Most current music is heavily dynamic compressed leaving very little space to differentiate better cod…

If I really strain myself, I can tell the difference between 128 and 320. But I never put that much effort into listening/appreciating music.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#218

Post by arihant »

input_sh wrote: post #106
willejs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify have it in the works, for release later this year. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-22/five-things-to-know-...

> Premium subscribers in select markets will be able to upgrade their sound quality to Spotify HiFi This sounds like it'll be an additional cost (like it is with Tidal), as opposed to Apple Music. Also I really can't think of a reason why it'd be region-locked. But anyways, been hoping for this for years and will definitely switch if I'm not geo-locked out of it. I've experimented a lot with FLAC and 320 kbps and I c…

One reason it may be region locked for Spotify is that they offer services at throwaway price in certain regions and those regions probably won’t subscribe to a much more expensive variant at enough volume to warrant delivery capacity. They offer Spotify premium for under $2 in Russia and India, for example. Apple offers at similar price point, but they are able to sell expensive phones and earphones that Spotify does not.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#219

Post by vultour »

viro wrote: post #163
cies wrote: post #23

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…

> with DRM Umm did I miss something? ...This for a music streaming service.

Yes, his argument is that it’s pointless for a streaming service

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#220

Post by Ashanmaril »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #38
cies wrote: post #23

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…

> 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". 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…

Being able to discern a difference in a side-by-side test doesn't really mean much.

You can tell which of 2 similar shades of blue is lighter next to each other, but if you were to look at one and then another a day apart you probably couldn't say which was lighter

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