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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

#441

Lossless is MEANINGLESS because Bluetooth audio itself is a lossy compressed stream. How are Apple going to market lossless streaming to Airpods, when such a thing is technically impossible?

They aren’t marketing it to AirPods. They’re marketing the spatial audio for the AirPods. They even call out that for the highest quality lossless you need a DAC.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#442
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.

It's been said many times, but with good equipment and familiarity with the instruments of the genre can (and will) change the outcome of these tests.

320CBR MP3 will sound extremely good, but with a good system and some relaxed listening in a silent environment will highlight the differences for who knows what to listen for.

By a "good system" I don't mean $10K+ systems on isolated rooms. A good vintage amplifier with a relatively modern CD player with good quality (Burr Brown / Wolfson) DAC and high quality speakers is enough.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#443
post #164
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony is working on a version that uses an image of your ear to find a better match. They talked about it in a few PS5 talks.

Its out. WMX-100M4s and a tidal/ deezer/ nugs subscription are all you need. https://electronics.sony.com/360-reality-audio

That's cool. Is it out for PS5 yet?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lossless, and possibly upsampling before editing, but high end gear probably does that by default. As for bitrate compression, although I have a good musical ear, I can't find any appreciable difference from a high bitrate (320) mp3 and the corresponding lossless track, so no problems using mp3s to listen to music. I also managed to resample my entire portable playlist (yeah, making mp3s out of mp3s, I know in some c…

Not sure you're saving your ears by doing this compared to say, turning the volume down. You can't 'uncompress' an MP3 back to having the dynamic range it had before.

"You can't 'uncompress' an MP3 back to having the dynamic range it had before."

True. In fact I would rather compress old music to bring it to the same dynamics of the new one, then and only then normalize everything. I know it's almost a crime; I did it just on my player and would never give these tracks to anyone.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#445
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…

I’m not an audiophile, but a couple days ago my wife had the radio in the car on and I thought something was wrong with the stereo, the middle range of the music were missing. It was all snare and a muted bass. I tried adjusting the EQ, but it had no real effect. I was a little worried about my own hearing at this point, but I saw that the station was broadcasting in “HD.” I looked this up and HD apparently means tha…

That's interesting. I haven't paid that much attention, and I don't purport to have a great ear for these things, but whenever my car FM radio switches over to HD I always perceive a quality increase. It could be that there is wild variation based on the digital encoder hardware/software different radio stations use for their HD streams.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#446

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've done blind tests and I can tell if I try really hard but I wouldn't even say that the mp3 sounds worse, just different. I focus on hi hats. I do collect lossless audio for archival reasons and the ability to convert from a non lossy source. I believe that high bitrate audio is entirely bullshit though- as Chris Montgomery has shown: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

> high bitrate audio

Based on the opening part of that video, I think you must have meant to say high sampling rate.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#447

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 remember when "gapless playback" was a big deal when it was eventually added to iPods.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple TV the streaming service. Not Apple TV the hardware or Apple TV the app or any other Apple TV that apple makes.

The streaming service is Apple TV+ while the App is TV and the device is called Apple TV.

https://dcurt.is/apple-tv-all-the-way-down

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either you keep your head stationary and get the non-Spatial Audio sound (i.e. what they optimized for 90%+ of their audience) I literally have no idea what you're talking about. Using Spatial Audio on my AirPods Pro is insanely better, and still very much spatial, even without actively moving my head. First, the sound appears to be coming from outside of my head, rather than between my ears -- no "headphone fatigu…

Can you offer a good example video? I’ve done some binaural recording in the past, but my reaction so far to Apple’s spatial audio has been… kinda meh.

Hamilton on Disney+ is my go-to to test/show off spatial audio. It really does sound like the audio is coming from specific places on the stage.
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