Apple Music HiFi

Soldato
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Maybe I'm oblivious but I can't work out what the spatial audio does. When I had some Sony WF1000XM3 they had a 3D sound thing which sounded great but haven't had the same effect with spatial audio just yet

I expect if I had them side by side I'd notice a difference
 
Soldato
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Maybe I'm oblivious but I can't work out what the spatial audio does. When I had some Sony WF1000XM3 they had a 3D sound thing which sounded great but haven't had the same effect with spatial audio just yet

I expect if I had them side by side I'd notice a difference

The song itself needs to be coded as dolby Atmos, it basically makes the audio range sound better. If you play a normal song that's not Atmos, it won't be any different
 
Soldato
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The song itself needs to be coded as dolby Atmos, it basically makes the audio range sound better. If you play a normal song that's not Atmos, it won't be any different

Yeah I was just flicking between The Weekend's atmos track linked above and the same one on YouTube. I can hear the difference there, or the vocals sound more pronounced at least
 
Associate
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It's great, they just killed Tidal too and in the new upcoming OS, most the third party authentication apps.
 
Soldato
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It’s cool. I hope it catches on in a way - more than the rare 5.1 mixes of albums did - because music has basically been recorded in stereo for so long (following mono, obviously) largely because hi-fi and headphones have been… stereo. Two ears and all that.

Hi-fi stereo listeners these days are probably in the minority as far as who is listening to music at a given moment these days, so if the ability to realistically create a 3D soundstage in your head becomes more normalised due to improvements in audio hardware/software in phones/buds/in-ears, maybe it’s time more musicians embraced the chance to explore than instead of the normal pan left - centre - pan right, with the different tracks in the mix.
 
Soldato
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So is anyone else having some really major issues since apple made the change with Lossless and Atmos?

Ios 14.6 here and songs keep stopping at around the 15 second mark.

I checked on macrumours and there is some big threads on the same issues. Apple really have screwed up here it seems.
 
Soldato
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I’m just irritated that they’ve decided (at least for now) not to support the lossless formats on the Apple Music/iTunes windows desktop app.
There’s no reason why they can’t implement it. I hope it’s only a temporary thing as it seems petty. There must be a fair few people who use Windows/iTunes so why do it?
 
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Caporegime
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Btw this obviously won't work on wireless headphones because none of the AirPods line support lossless audio and Apple don't support the latest Bluetooth standard for non-Apple buds/IEMs/cans anyway (I don't think they're 100% uncompressed either), so you'll only get lossless and hi-res - which is marketing guff anyway - on wired earphones/headphones or if you're using Apple music with a wired speaker set-up.

To me is fine since I can't hear any difference between AAC 256kbps and ALAC in a blind volume-matched test and when I'm using my in-ears it's hardly a perfect listening environment anyway. At home with my speaker set-up it'll be nice psychologically more than anything as my streaming service will finally be the same quality, audible or otherwise as my old CD collection.

People tend not to be able to in general anyway, once you get above CD quality it's into nonsense claims from the golden ears brigade most of the time... Maybe a test track, maybe is some super nerdy-autistic hi-fi enthusiast can do it with some particular tiny change to an instrument sound in some known track but most of the time, for most people... nah. And for those who claim otherwise most of them are deceiving themselves too.

I guess if there is some additional information there re: 3D audio etc.. (as per this thread) then that's a bit different but just in general these large file sizes are mostly a complete waste. thing is because competing services have endorsed the audiophile guff and gone with large file sizes for regular stereo tracks I guess this new atmos/3D stuff will need to maintain the overly large files for this stuff even if not really necessary.
 
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