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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

#201

Post by Mandelmus »

Someone1234 wrote: post #46

This is included/no additional cost which is fantastic. I do wonder if in the longer term if Apple's Spatial Audio with "dynamic head tracking" isn't the next 3D TVs/3D Content i.e. a gimmick. Taking traditional multi-source audio (Dolby/Atmos/etc) and jamming it into stereo is old tech, it doesn't work particularly well but is cheap to make/consume, thus mostly harmless. The new Spatial Audio is using gyroscopes to…

This Apple Music “spatial audio” just means Dolby Atmos. It is not the same gyroscope-based spatial audio that they use on Apple TV.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#202

Post by tarsinge »

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…

I'm actually quite skeptical random people with high end gear can hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless. It has more to do with ear training, mp3 compression is not really on the same axis than what high end gear give you (basic equipment can have a large frequency response).

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#203

Post by heartbreak »

Saint_Genet wrote: post #92

I sure hope spatial audio won't be the only way music will be delivered in the future. It'd be a complete nightmare for people like me who has severely impaired hearing on one ear.

There's a toggle to turn it off in the volume control menu.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#204

Post by capableweb »

bidirectional wrote: post #65
capableweb wrote: post #2

Maybe I was reading it all too quickly but they never seem to outline the format they'll actually use for the lossless songs. Anyone happen to know? Edit: Seems they are using their own format ALAC, sad but not surprising

Why is it sad? It's a streaming service, I'm not sure why format would matter.

Apple now optimize their hardware for playback of ALAC. If they went with FLAC, they would probably optimize their hardware for FLAC instead, meaning others could also take advantage of their optimizations.

But that's exactly why they went with their own format, so they can claim it's more battery efficient or something, compared to others who use open standards but the hardware is not optimized for it.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#205

Post by lucideer »

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…

TL;DR of a lot of the relevant sibling replies here: DR is a lot better on some (not all) masters of lossless releases.

I tbh think "sound(s) bigger and stronger" is actually a pretty decent layman's phrase for "has a higher dynamic range".

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#206

Post by TeMPOraL »

pwagland wrote: post #95
Someone1234 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is crux to the argument. If you know what to listen for, you can pick out the "bad bits", since you know that is where the issue lies. Once you know how to identify bad bits, then you'll be able to "hear" compression artefacts because you'll be primed for them. In A/B tests this is true, I _can_ reliably (not 100%, but way better than random) tell you which of A/B is compressed, and I can normally do this on som…

Problem is, sometimes when you learn how to spot a deficiency, you can't unlearn it and stop spotting it. It's like with kerning[0] or image compression artifacts. Everyone has a different level, and I haven't measured mine, but even when casually listening to music - including music from bad speakers in a waiting room somewhere - I can identify too badly compressed music and get immediately annoyed by it.

--

[0] - https://xkcd.com/1015/

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#208

Post by vr46 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #61
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…

ALAC and FLAC are technically very similar formats [1]. Both are bit-perfect. Compare with MQA which is utter garbage and has absolutely zero to do with losless. MQA is actually, objectively worse than 16 bit audio CDs. An abject failure backed by an aggressively anti-science company backed up by a bunch of lawyers. [1] Both encode a PCM stream using linear prediction while storing the difference between the predicto…

Very interesting and completely new to me, I had no idea Tidal wasn’t the equivalent of lossless.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#209

Post by unfamiliar »

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…

> I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests.

Every time this comes up someone says this. I've never seen anyone actually doing it. e.g. a video of setting up a double blind test of this and someone actually passing consistently.

When I've challenged people IRL who claim the same thing the response is always "Well, obviously I can't do it with any of the audio gear that either of us have access to... but if I did have high end gear I could tell for sure!"

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#210

Post by skrause »

StavrosK wrote: post #118
PaulHoule wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Converting files to Ogg Vorbis a long time ago was something I regret. There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder or Apple's AAC encoder (maybe the only quality AAC encoder) but you are guaranteed to have to re-encode if you want to play on your sports watch, in your car, play on your smart speakers, etc.)

> There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder Really? From tests I did way back in the day, the quality was comparable at around half the size. It's a shame Vorbis support isn't widespread though, given that it's royalty-free. Let's hope Opus has a better fate.

MP3 is also royalty-free now and MP3 encoders are much better than they were 20 years ago.
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