I guess this is a response to Amazon Music HD, and soon Spotify HiFi. I have been waiting for Spotify HiFi since the Feb announcement...
Any of these use FLAC? Or does everyone invent their own wheel?
Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
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Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#72> 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. 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.
Not necessarily, but for the best effects yes. You can use head related transfer functions (HRTFs) to simulate spatial audio with just one driver per ear. Granted the effects aren’t as significant as multi-driver setups, I was able to get a convincing spatial audio demo working with in-ear devices for an Audio Tech course project back in school.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#73Earlier 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…
Yeah, I've heard similar about MQA.
To be honest though, what's the science behind any of these formats in terms of listening experience? Clearly there are differences in the data and how much of the original content is represented. But have there been any studies on whether people can actually tell any difference?
I've come across some quizzes online, etc., and those mostly suggest I can sometimes tell, but even when I can, it's not obvious and it doesn't really impact my experience. Would be curious whether anyone has studied this more fully.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#74I don't believe it.
If I read that right they claim that they can deliver "spatial" audio via headphones using a multi-channel/object-based Dolby Atmos (as opposed to a binaural recording or something that else that is mixed for two channels ahead of time)
For years there has been talk about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
and for years I have tried demos that are unimpressive, particularly in favorable areas such as video games. Sure, with practice you can learn "sounds like I have a head cold" means "the audio source is supposed to be above my head" but it's nothing like real life.
I invite you to test out your own "spatial audio" abilities in your environment, including:
* locating sound sources within a few degrees and pointing at them
* your ability to estimate how far away sounds are
* your ability to sense walls in your environment from the sound of your footsteps reflecting off them and not walk into them
What's certain is that the signal is going to get heavy processing that will damage it -- the whole point of HRTF is that the timbre of the sound is distorted by your outer ears fairly violently as a function of angle. The distortion is real, but the spatial perception isn't. (Other spatial audio tricks run into problems with coherence -- if you have two copies of the same note combined electronically or acoustically they will be in phase in some places and out of phase in other places... Just like the "speckle" you would see if you diffused a laser pointer and tried to use it like a flashlight)
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#75> 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.
Perhaps Apple TV doesn’t have an H1 or W1 chip? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors
Apple TV doesn’t have speakers. The device sending audio digitally to another device (an actual TV or sound bar in this case) wouldn’t need one, the device driving the speakers would need one.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#76> 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.
Because they can't guarantee the Apple TV is hooked up to Atmos capable speakers. With the headphones and built-in speakers they know they can fake Atmos. Not so on a random TV.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#77Since 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,
The BBC has produced a number of 3D recordings ("binaural sound") of classical music performances. These recordings are designed for headphones. You can try them out here (requires sign-in to play):
BBC Philharmonic binaural recordings:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/experience-classical-bbc-philh...
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#78From 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've got two recordings of Machine Head's Through The Ashes Of Empires, one 320kbps mp3 and one flac, which is the one I usually listen to.
So some day I'm listening to that album as I'm wont to do and I notice there's some cracks missing. After questioning my sanity a bit it turns out the mp3 ones somehow managed to sneak into my playlist.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#79This 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…
It's really difficult (almost impossible) to keep your head perfectly still.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#80From 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…
Do you think the record labels would be fine with Apple streaming their IP in a lossless and DRM-free format? It's self-evident that DRM-free is objectively more versatile, but it's also self-evident that it can't not have DRM for business reasons.