Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#451

Post by dmix » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

VT_Dude wrote: post #370

StrictDabbler wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies. Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over. Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have…

Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference. https://www.theoretica.us/ https://bacch.com/

I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers.

It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s

I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#452

Post by simias » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #421

simias wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree,…

To start replicating the sound of an orchestra, you'll at a minimum need one speaker at each location where a player is, playing a single channel (the instrument). But even this is simplifying things, because each instrument has a different body shape, different sound projection, which would need to be replicated by specialized speakers. Also, the room has an important effect on how the sound waves travel and hit you…

Of course not, what you need is model the way your ear handles sound coming from various locations then model this and reproduce it. It's like VR, but for your ears. That's how ASMR effectively works. If you want full immersion you can add head tracking so that the sound "rotates" around you when you move your head. I know that Apple offers that with their latest headphones.

Admittedly in order to do this you need to have post-processing specific for every person since we don't process sound exactly the same depending on our physiology. I know that Sony attempted something like that with its "3D audio". I think it's a bit of a gimmick myself, but it's technically doable.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#453

Post by lloeki » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #195

CannisterFlux wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on bog-standard Android, Ogg files tend not to be as well supported by random music programs compared to MP3. I re-ripped a few CDs in MP3 that I'd also foolishly done to ogg just have them play gapless in VLC I think it was (might have been some other app, I forget now), otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. And another app I use to slow down or pitch shif…

>otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. Oh christ, this is my least favorite thing about newer audio formats. Some of the old albums were meant to be heard in one stretch; there are no gaps between tracks, because you're hearing a story. Then comes mp3 and digital audio, with a second pause between them. It just kills me. I get accused of being a hipster by my fa…

I stopped having this issue for well over a decade. Especially on some albums I enjoy there are tracks which are logically separate (on CD as well as files) yet "play" into one another continuously, so I'd have noticed this as it would produce a weird silence in an otherwise seamless musical transition.

It's entirely a player thing to start decoding the next track slightly before the current track ends and continuously feed the audio buffer with no gap. This has nothing to do with mp3 and digital audio, but everything with players that don't conceptually split between reading a file and pushing audio to the output but are just glorified shell for loops over mpg321.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#454

Post by alanbernstein » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #421

simias wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree,…

To start replicating the sound of an orchestra, you'll at a minimum need one speaker at each location where a player is, playing a single channel (the instrument). But even this is simplifying things, because each instrument has a different body shape, different sound projection, which would need to be replicated by specialized speakers. Also, the room has an important effect on how the sound waves travel and hit you…

What if you only want to replicate the sound of an orchestra as heard by an observer at a specified point? Why wouldn't two microphones be sufficient? That's how it's perceived, after all.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#455

Post by frereubu » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #374

coliveira wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true about popular music, because this is how we came to know this style of music - live performances (without proper sound engineering) sound worse. It is completely the opposite for classical music. There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra.

>There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree,…

> What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment?

An orchestra is a large number of instruments spread across a wide stage. Each of those instruments is its own sound source. The audio cortex in the brain is highly tuned to understand things like the 3D location of sounds from cues generated by factors like the individual shape of our ears and how sounds bounce around and down into the ear canal.

Now I'm sure you'd agree that sitting in front of two speakers X metres apart, or with headphones on, no matter how good those speakers / headphones are is a different set of sound waves.

Some people are absolutely able to determine the difference between those sound sources. They're likely to have listened to a lot of music. I think these discussions get derailed by the blanket "people can" or "people can't" statements rather than thinking about who might be able to make those distinctions. It might be that the majority of people can't make that distinction. But that doesn't mean that no-one can.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#456

Post by pimlottc » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

nxc18 wrote: post #292

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…

For me it is Spotify Connect, and I still can’t believe no one has copied. I’m in the process of getting my speakers set up with airplay, which might be my one way out. It still won’t be as good as Spotify Connect. I just hate that Spotify is deliberately trying to make my Mac and iPhone worse (e.g. Spotify is the only reason Rosetta is running on my M1 Mac) as part of their little war with Apple.

Agree, it's really nice to start streaming from my computer to my Sonos speakers and know that I can close out the app and it will keep playing. And if I need to change it from across the room, I can just pick up my phone.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#457

Post by tshaddox » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

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…

I switched from Apple Music to Spotify for around 12 months, starting before but mostly overlapping with the pandemic lockdowns. I found their playlists, auto-play features, and discovery better than Apple Music's. Spotify links are ubiquitous on social media and elsewhere, which is nice (although Apple isn't far off either). And their Spotify Connect ecosystem is pretty nice: I loved how I could click the speaker button in the Spotify app on my iPhone and stream my music to the "Everything" group that plays simultaneously on all 3 Amazon Alexa speakers I have in my apartment. Apple Music's integration with Alexa speakers is nearly non-existent.

But I ended up switching back to Apple Music because of something that seems so minor but is so fundamental: Spotify on iPhone simply does not let you browse your entire library by artist. You can search your library and find anything you want, of course, but there is simply no way to serendipitously browse all the artists in your library. You can "follow" artists and browse all those artists, but that's a separate system from your music library, and when you click on an artist you just get the standard Spotify artist page (rather than a list of that artist's albums that you have in your library). For me this ended up being a dealbreaker and meant that during my Spotify trial I listened to much less music than usual because I simply couldn't browse my library effectively.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#458

Post by not_good_coder » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

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…

On NPRs site I can tell which track is the wav file by observing the load time of each track.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#459

Post by antiterra » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #388

dagmx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDs of popular music are actually the easiest to find. (Target, Walmart or any big local equivalent will have the top charting artists stocked as CDs) It's the more esoteric artists that have become increasingly difficult to get CDs for. Streaming is really a boon for anything outside the mainstream.

The last time I bought a cd-looking disc, the "CD" "CompactDisc" logo/words/terms were nowhere on it, inside or out. I seem to recall that meant they weren't actually CDs, they just happened to look exactly like them, and usually function in a CD player. Computers often had trouble with them. I don't know if this is true, or just bs, but there you go.

The logo you want is the CD Digital Audio logo which requires adherence to the red book standard. Music discs with Sony root kit DRM did not have this logo.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#460

Post by pnt12 » Mon, May 17, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

tristanc wrote: post #85

ivraatiems wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Over and over again I’ve been impressed with Tidal’s song radio functionality. Unless you’re trying it out with very obscure songs that might only have a few listens total on the platform, Tidal’s radio always recommends tracks that are specific to that track’s subgenre/region. Meanwhile Spotify always seems to recommend songs that are only mildly related and that I’ve already listened to. Other than playlists, it fe…

To me that's a great feature from Spotify, as I like exploring lota a lot of different genres and sounds. But I can see that is a personal taste and others would prefer a different experince.