Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
apple.com
apple.com
> 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, as the inaudible loss of quality with minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) is audible when the sound is sped up or slowed down.
But, and this the article does not mention, is not what Apple Music wants you to do. The formats will be proprietary with DRM.
I prefer FLAC/OggVorbis/etc when it comes to music. But then I like to be able to mix/remix.
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 compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones than a compressed version, even 320kbps MP3. A poorly mastered track will be much harder (if not outright impossible) to tell the difference on.
HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you couldn’t hear the difference". But historically a key reason for people to prefer e.g. SACD releases of recordings is not because one can hear the extra frequencies of this format, but because the SACD release – being targeted at people with a good stereo and silent listening environment – is mastered with more dynamic range. The mainstream release of the same music, on the other hand, often features a different mastering with levels pushed up, because they assume that ordinary people will be listening to music in noisy environments, like through earbuds in the metro. This is often a problem for re-releases of 1960s recordings of jazz where the producer and engineer really exploited dynamic range, but that is lost in the most recent of the digital-era re-releases.
(Another reason to prefer SACDs and Blu-ray releases of recordings is for the possibility of 5.0 surround sound, because of course CD and mainstream downloads or streaming are limited to mono or stereo only.)
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 hurts your argument, since you may just be learning what to expect in your environment. The crux of the article/discussion is that people cannot blindly pick the highest quality, which they cannot (since the different colorings of the music are subjective anyway).
The POINT is blind test 128 MP3 and lossless. Still the vast majority of people don't have the equipment to hear any difference.
The Second POINT is most people prefer to have boomy colored sound and again that ruins the need for lossless. This is why people prefer old vinyl records. It compresses the sound and makes it sound better in most people's opinion. If people would listen to 80s tapes I bet they would love that sound also.
The Third POINT music is heard with background noise all the time. No way while listening to music people could tell the difference and those that can it would require great concentration. There is a limited return of investment for most people.
Personally I own a DAC and a preamp and have my hundreds of dollars headphones and my Genlec speakers that cost thousands of dollars. I hear a SLIGHT difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC and that is 100% concentration and I can hear a difference in only certain types of music. Classical Jazz and Classical music. I can't tell with pop and electronic music which is what most people listen to.
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!"
If you think you can really hear fine differences in audio, it can be very eye opening (ear opening?).
Something not perceivable when listening to AAC decoding directly punched into a wired headset vs reencoding for BT transport which could transform previously unhearable compression artifacts into the perceivable range (think editing a jpeg and resaving as jpeg often produces artifacts)
I have not seen any tests for that.
(Of course if the device is able to push the AAC stream to the headset this does not happen. This kind of thing is quite opaque and hard to get info about as to which hardware or combination of hardware would support that)
> So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones
I'm quite convinced that a good part of vinyl being reputably better comes from that, especially with the virtuous loop of audiophiles being the main audience for modern vinyl, which calls for good mastering.
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:
Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all samples. So you will always be able to find corner cases where an encoder or format does worse and results in more audible artifacts; some of these might be encoder bugs, some might not. Therefore, it is fair to say that you might not want to rely on lossy compression for archival. But it is perfectly reasonable to use it to put music on devices to actually listen to.
You say good mastering makes it easier to notice encoding artifacts, but actually, bad mastering can do that too. Over-compressed stuff (in dynamic range) with inter-sample peaks above 0dB can clip and distort after getting run through a lossy codec.
As for lossless formats, though, anything above 48kHz 16 bits is complete nonsense for final delivery to consumers. All the "high resolution" stuff with higher sample rates and bit depths is just marketing bullshit, and this has been repeatedly demonstrated in trials (the well-designed ones anyway; there are plenty of terrible ones - no, comparing the 96kHz download to the 48kHz download of a song is not how you test this properly).
Bit depths above 16 are useful during production (because quantization noise accumulates and is boosted by things like dynamic range compression); in practice you want to record at 24 bits for headroom reasons, and process in 32-bit float because there's no reason not to with modern computers (and many practical advantages, e.g. ~infinite dynamic range). Sample rates above 48kHz are less so; the main reason to use them is to avoid aliasing artifacts, but it is usually much more effective to do that with well-designed DSP algorithms that include internal oversampling, as opposed to just doing everything at a higher sample rate. Unless you're doing extreme pitch shifting; then higher sample rates may make sense.
Videos everyone interested in audio production should watch:
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M
The little tidbit at the end of the second video about how 48kHz is, in some respects, twice as good as 44.1kHz, is quite neat and not something I'd realized before.
The only "real" test for these sorts of things is
> You've got a new device. Your streaming app defaults to low-quality upon installation. How long until you notice this?
I'm using WH-1000XM3 headphones and am a lifelong musician with pretty mild tinnitus.
You can tell which of 2 similar shades of blue is lighter next to each other, but if you were to look at one and then another a day apart you probably couldn't say which was lighter
And even if I could detect the difference, I am not convinced that the improvement in bitrate would actually result in any increased enjoyment.
4/6 with two errors where I confused 320Kbps and raw wav.
But to be honest, I could hardly distinguish between the samples and I mostly guessed.
And I have a mid-range mini amp that fits in between my books, and two mid-range dali speakers hooked up with a regular 3.5mm outlet to my Ryzen MSI PC board, volume up to max on the computer but not on the amp.
Not "even" as if that was any good. MP3 320kbps is a very low bar.
OPUS vbr averaging 128kbps is much harder than mp3 320kbps to ABX against FLAC.
MP3 simply is a really bad codec by current standards.
All that being said, I still use FLAC for nearly everything for two reasons: 1) Since it's lossless, it makes a good "transit medium"; I can have some assurances that it's not going to degrade in quality with subsequent renders if I import the audio into a video editor and export it to 24 Bit FLAC.
2) Hard drive space is pretty cheap nowadays. I have a home streaming server that I set up to stream to my stereo (doesn't do any additional compression from the input source), and even if it is psychosomatic, I do like knowing that I have the highest quality possible. I'll admit it's silly, but the music sounds better psychologically because I know it's lossless, even if I realistically cannot tell a difference in a blind test.
True. No one else bothers with it though, because why should they when FLAC exists? That makes ALAC, in practice, largely an Apple-only format.
I've given up on arguing with audiophiles about this. In the end if they enjoy their overpriced setups to listen to 196kHz 32bits-per-sample uncompressed tracks who am I to tell them otherwise? It won't keep me from listening to compressed audio on my cheapo USB DAC with my mid-range earphones and enjoying it just as much.
Me, I see spatial audio and I'm like... Ah, that's annoying, because it's yet another proprietary gimmick, and it means the format will likely be incompatible with everything else. You could see a proliferation of audio files that are only usable on Apple devices. Stereo seems... Based in physical reality, ubiquitous, and very practical. I hope Google doesn't try to copy them just like they did after Apple decided to remove the headphone jack, because that wasn't an upgrade. Deprecating trusted, reliable technology to try to entice buyers is not an upgrade.
That's one way to look at it. Personally I'd say that it stops companies like Tidal (et al) from posturing as being "more high end" based on these dubious and mostly bullshit claims around lossless and high-res audio formats.
Hopefully the outcome will be that we'll be hearing fewer bullshit arguments about how "Tidal sounds better than Apple Music". The people who like their placebos can enjoy their placebos; the rest of us can get on with our lives.
Indeed, here is such a test: https://gxip23wuyntw2qbzp2f7yfke6y-ac5fdsxevxq4s5y-www-heise...
Even trained listeners using high-end equipment weren’t able to distinguish between CD and 256 kbps MP3 in double-blind tests.
Much better results would be had with 1 month of A, then switching to B.
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.)
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.
Bigger. Stronger. Warmer. Not that these cannot meaningfully describe audio. But it tells me they cannot quantify the difference.
For what it’s worth, music actually purchased on iTunes (not an Apple Music subscription) has been DRM-free for years. If this means iTunes-purchased songs are lossless now, that might be useful.
I just wish digital audio players would pick it up.
They are called _Compact Discs_ and you can get them pretty cheap these days!
I hear what you're saying, but the convenience of a vast and portable library is compelling.
CDs aren't lossless unless the material was recorded at or below 16 bit/44.1kHz.
You can argue whether the difference is perceptible - some blind studies suggest not - but this fact is what led to a variety of semi-obscure audiophile disc formats that offered higher sampling rates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD).
Two things... CD quality (16 bit / 44.1 kHz stereo) was "big" in the eighties but it now makes for really tiny files. 1 TB harddisk and much more are common for consumers. Why are we still even arguing about 320 kbps mp3 when we can have provably bitperfect rips of our CDs, which can serve both as archive and for listening?
The second thing: from the other side of a big room I cannot tell the difference between a 100 dpi color printing of a painting and a 1200 dpi color printing of that same painting. Well... Even if I cannot tell the difference I do prefer to know I have the 1200 dpi print and not the 100 dpi one.
Why would I even take the risk, even I cannot consciously tell the difference, to have something of lesser quality?
mp3 was lots of fun in the Napster days when we were running 28.8 k baud modems and had 3.2 GB HDD. But nowadays I've got 1 TB HDDs... To me the mp3 ship has sailed and won't be missed. It's FLAC and only FLAC. CD quality everywhere. I don't own SACD (maybe I should) but got a lot of CDs. And FLACs are my CD in digital version. mp3s simply aren't.
And that's in 2021. I cannot imagine, say, in 2026. This "mp3 vs flac" argument is never ever going to go back in favor of mp3: as time passes the room it takes to store your music collection as FLAC keeps getting proportionally tinier and tinier.
It doesnt say if the high res tracks are included in a subscription which is interesting as competing services usually have a higher price tier for this. Services like Tidal & Qobuz differentiate themselves on high res but it is such a tiny percentage of their catalog thats its often a waste of effort.
And then there is the whole hardware support question, Android down samples everything and Apples codec over bluetooth isnt going to support anything high res anyway.
This all sounds like features for the average user (bigger numbers are better) where in reality it probably holds value for less than 1% of users.
I suspect like many things, that this is Apple’s attempt at providing a service that’s just valid enough that they can dry up the competitors then relax their quality and get back to selling the products they want to sell people.
This just seems like a waste of bandwidth for streaming though.
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.
low frequencies: dull, humming noise
mid range: sounds like the sound is coming from a sock
higher frequencies: too squeaky is the best way I can describe it.
I have permanent tinnitus though. The better/higher the sound quality, the less noticeable it is. And of coarse listening to a real instrument a few meters away (that doesn't go through a mic & amplifier) is an absolute treat.
Yes, but lossless audio is still useful for transcoding. If you want to play music on your phone, and you have plenty of fixed hard drive space on your desktop (which is very cheap), it's rational to compress with an advanced codec to ~90 kbps since your headphones probably aren't good enough to pass anything more hi-fi and you want space for pictures and videos. However, if your downloads come lossy compressed, you'll introduce transcoding artifacts; you can get around this by transcoding at a significantly higher bitrate, but now the compressed file is wasting space!
Someone noted a song by the Bangles, which featured a little finger cymbal. (Two discs worn on a finger and thumb)
That sound was missing and or rendered poorly. Turns out it offers very little sound under 5Khz. The codec parameters were increased to address those few cases, but are still below 10Khz, I believe.
The other discussion was quality over choice. Fact is a full FM bitstream performed great. More than good enough to really enjoy in a car. Most people would trade the losses for lack of fuzz and noise present on analog RF.
"CD Quality" was, and today is not accurate at all in the technical sense, but the overall feel is more like a CD than it is analog media, so... that is what they went with.
However, being able to offer several streams meant multiple branding, commercial free streams to promote digital radio, and, and, and.
Mostly, that discussion resolved to choice being king over quality. Improving quality at the expense of choice = wasted bits. That is by far the dominant view in broadcast.
A little thought experiment explains why:
Say you have a radio, and you get two stations. One offers compelling content, but the quality is low. The other is amazing good quality, but is just not compelling.
Which do you listen to?
Given others find the same material compelling that you do, which do you believe they will listen to?
And that is why peak quality on broadcast is no longer a thing.
Streaming services can offer compelling and quality choices to a higher degree than broadcast can, which means generally higher quality, even when available bitrates are, or could be. comparable. But, if they are ever pinned, they will favor choice over quality in a pinch, because compelling content wins over quality nearly all the time.
I pretty much gave up on radio around this time too. Being able to carry a good music library around meant just using a car system as an output device.
For a time, I did enjoy live or daily broadcasts, talk, news, sports. But, those carry such a high commercial load, and when phones and data plans began to favor streaming, I switched completely.
...all of which is why I am not too current on how HD Radio performs today. Next time I rent a car, I will have to scan the dial to see what, if anything, has changed.
Umm did I miss something? ...This for a music streaming service.
Who's to say that Apple now or in the future might not want to do what amounts to dynamic "re-mixing" on-device? Presumably whatever adaptive tricks they might like to pull to make your music sound better or sync up to AR scenes or ... would benefit from the uncompressed source.
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.
I tbh think "sound(s) bigger and stronger" is actually a pretty decent layman's phrase for "has a higher dynamic range".
That Scoopertino post never fails to amuse me.
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-what-if-apple-m...
For arbitrary reasons, Apple Music will: remove songs from albums and re-add them to your library as the "single" or "deluxe" versions; split albums and intersperse tracks between both; and duplicate songs in albums.
The albums usually still exist in Apple Music—I just have to go out of my way to remove the mangled music and re-add the album. Problem is, there is no warning or notification it happened.
Examples:
[1] https://pasteboard.co/K2kdUN3.png This album is totally messed up. Multiple track 3 with different titles, one unavailable, missing tracks that were re-added to my library as singles.
[2] https://pasteboard.co/K2keFBV.png One song pulled out into a greatest hits compilation and duplicated
[3] https://pasteboard.co/K2kfc0b.png All tracks, except 1, removed. The album still exists in Apple Music.
[4] https://pasteboard.co/K2kfBTR.png Originally added the original version of Camp by Childish Gambino to my library—here it's split between deluxe and basic, with tracks arbitrarily mixed between both.
[...and many more]
I've started to feel like "Apple Music as a music library" was really only intended as a bridge for people like you and me that were reluctant to abandon their obsessively curated their music library for the brave new world of streaming music. After a few years of it my listening habits have changed and I've more or less let go and stopped worrying about the drudgery of maintaining "my library".
Despite what anyone thinks about music piracy, what.cd had hands down the best music organization I've ever seen. I wish they had just dropped the torrents and kept the indexing features
All it needs is a toggle for "do not replace tracks". I would much rather see a message saying "this track is no longer available" and then make the decision myself than have to spend time unpicking whatever chaos it caused.
This also isn't to mention the fact that not all music is available to buy legally online. Dimmu Borgir, for example, use Nuclear Blast and I struggle to find retailers online that can sell me MP3s outside of iTunes. I don't want to have to deal with (read: rip) CDs and vinyl is a joke at 3x the price (not to mention simply being a dead format.)
So how are you going to curate a library, legally, so that the artist is supported, assuming you have at least 20-30 artists you like.
Just curious, looking for them, I see this:
[1] seems ok here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/yung-gravity-ep/1500799523
Is there another version of it on AM?
[2] I can't find on Apple Music - I'm guessing it's also an upload from your library?
[3] seems ok here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/outrun/1440873249
[4] Does deluxe version have more or different tracks? I see explicit and normal version, but they seem to have same tracklist? https://music.apple.com/us/album/camp/1450829373
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 measure head movements in order to adjust the audio accordingly, and new audio formats to make it work.
This may sound interesting if you haven't tried it, but it results in: Either you keep your head stationary and get the non-Spatial Audio sound (i.e. what they optimized for 90%+ of their audience) or whipping your head around to "enjoy" the effect (which is largely a movement accurate degradation).
It feels like cart-before-the-horse tech wherein they figured out they can do this thing, and now want to work backwards into what it may be useful for.
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 fatigue". It's vastly more comfortable and realistic.
Second, while dialog comes from straight ahead, sound effects like doors opening, cars honking etc. clearly come from angles, and things like wind come from all around, like an actual surround sound experience.
Third, because the dialog tracks are separated from other sounds spatially, the dialog is easier to understand as well. I used to sometimes put on subtitles for certain material to understand fully in normal stereo -- I never have to anymore with spatial audio.
> Taking traditional multi-source audio (Dolby/Atmos/etc) and jamming it into stereo is old tech
I've used all that old tech too, and for whatever reason Apple's spatial audio is leagues better. I'm not sure if it's something about being optimized for known headphone characteristics, or the head tracking, or something clever with the inward-facing microphones, or all of the above, but it's nothing like that old tech.
> now want to work backwards into what it may be useful for.
It's useful for listening, end of story. I'm honestly mystified why you think it's a gimmick. I can't even imagine going back to listening to movies and TV without it. (I project from my iPad onto a screen, connect my AirPods Pro, and it's basically like being in an actual cinema, but without waking anyone else up at night from booming surround sound.)
For what it's worth, I have a pair of Audeze headphones that has 3D head tracking or whatever they call it, and I don't think it's a gimmick.
When I'm wearing those and watching a movie on my TV (or playing a game on my PC), the sound really does appear to be coming from in front of me (or beside/behind me depending on the channel or the mix), and if I turn my head, the sound stays put.
It's somewhat subtle, but it can make me forget that I'm wearing headphones and I personally find it really adds to the experience.
Instead they’d just find a way to make the battery bigger because they know people care a ton about that.
Also, everyone keeps talking about consciously moving your head around. Record yourself doing something on your computer for 5 minutes and watch how much your head already, unconsciously moves around. It’s a lot.
Yes it’s subtle, but it’s supposed to be. You’re meant to forget about it. It’s trying to more accurately reproduce our natural abilities.
I remember one of the first apps I downloaded on my iPod Touch in middle school (~2011) was a "binaural audio" app that catalogued spatial audio experiences (+ voice-acted stuff like getting a haircut, etc).
But first, back in 1972, there was Quadrophonic. Twice as good as stereo!
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 FLACs, ALACs, and CDs. Geez, my music spending has changed completely over the last decade.
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 importer to get my playlists to Tidal, and about 90% of my tracks made it - with some obvious mismatches/songs not found for unclear reasons. (There were also, in fairness, a few songs Tidal did have which the import tool missed.)
But Tidal just doesn't seem to have the radio and discovery features I use to find new music. If I used it, I'd have to constantly sync all my tracks (by paying for an external service) and risk losing some of them, for an audio quality difference that even most audiophiles seem to admit is negligible unless you're in ideal listening conditions with a track you know extremely well.
So even though they're constantly making things worse, I will stick with Spotify for now.
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.
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.
What the heck is it? And why should I log in? What company is behind it? What has it to do with Spotify? What's their target audience? Did they intentionally remove all information on that page? Is it an app for a smart phone? Or maybe I'm just too old..
Personally, lossless quality just sounds like a great way to blow through my data caps even faster. I'm sure some will love it, I question whether it's worth the extra bandwidth.
https://www.imore.com/airpods-max-dont-support-apple-musics-...
That's a pretty big miss. At the very least I would have expected them to include some large buffer to allow wireless playback.
I believe that the APMs were held back a long time from release. I had thought they were a year late.
If that's true, then it would make more sense that a plan for supporting lossless wouldn't be included.
If this is a codec issue as the article indicates is there any potential for a software fix?
One thing that really differentiates it is that the curated playlists seem a lot more cared for than with Spotify. I've found so many of the pre-made playlists that I enjoy, and with Spotify you just can't really do that since you never know what's really there because the curator liked it and what's there because the label paid for it. Fun fact: The Apple Music Android app is suprisingly decent!
Completely agree. This was Beats Music’s raison d’etre, and Apple Not only maintained the playlist curation team/process/whatever, but have made it bigger and better.
My favorite playlists get regularly updated - seemingly by the same person, or someone with extremely similar tastes in music, and I love it.
Hard to take artists demands to be paid better seriously when they keep agreeing to things like this.
Honestly they are their own worst enemy at times.
I started using Apple Music because Spotify’s attempts to ruin podcasts by making them exclusive to their platform irritated me.
Discover weekly is a really great thing though and Apple Music’s stuff isn’t as good.
Spotify seems to be pushing out playlist after playlist without giving much afterthought. The quality is just not there , some seem to be auto-generated and a lot of playlist are duplicate/similar to each other.
Apple's playlist are regularly manually curated and you can know the theme just by glancing through their succinct titles.
In an untreated room, moving your head to the side by a few inches will have a far greater effect on the frequency response of the recording. More than any gains you could get from upgrading to a hi-res streaming service. You have to have your speakers and your room in order before any of those differences will be appreciable. Additionally, if the reverb time of your room hasn't been controlled in the low frequencies a record with tight, articulate, bass is going to sound dense and muddy as those frequencies echo and build up in your room.
Just something to keep in mind when debating the merits of hi-res vs. a 44.1k mp3.
I choose 'phones because my music taste diverges too much from my wife's to make open air play an option, if I want to maintain peace.
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)
I haven’t tried the other two, but with a pair of AirPods Pro and a video source that support spatial audio, this is ridiculously easy to do, and 100% accurate. I don’t know what witchcraft they’ve employed, but I can easily pick up my iPhone with my eyes closed based on where the audio is ‘coming from’.
Also, with SA turned on, because it sounds like the audio is coming from outside your head instead of from your headphones, it’s much more enjoyable to listen to even without a bunch of surround sound stuff. Things like dialog sound much more ‘normal’.
I understand your skepticism, but their implementation works and it's amazing.
Is it exactly like real life? Of course not. To address your points:
* Yes, you can absolutely locate sound sources within a few degrees, it's astonishingly accurate
* No, you can't really estimate sound distance. It's absolutely coming from outside your head, but all sounds like it's kind of just a generic 5 ft away or something
* Of course you can't walk around your environment blind with them, it's not trying to
I highly suggest you try it with AirPods Pro and existing Apple TV+ content.
And remember, it's trying to simulate a real-life surround sound speaker setup. Not simulate real life itself. Movies aren't mastered to sound like real life, they're mastered to give a spatial audio component to the movie.
Personally I find the horizontal angle localisation excellent - vertical is slightly hit and miss.
But it probably depends on the person, too - HRTF models assume an "average" head
* your ability to sense walls in your environment from the sound of your footsteps reflecting off them and not walk into them
Wondering what's the point, then.
> Due to the large file sizes and bandwidth needed for Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless Audio, subscribers will need to opt in to the experience. Hi-Res Lossless also requires external equipment, such as a USB digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
There are lots of hardwired devices ready to playback in hi-res via phone or Mac, surely. And AirPods Max support spatial audio already and are apparently good quality.
I would expect the future of the H1 chip's audio streaming quality to soon be much better than Bluetooth.
Or is this only an Apple-specific thing that only works on Apple speakers.
I’m afraid I already know the answer and it only works on Apple stuff.
[0]https://professional.dolby.com/tv/dolby-atmos-for-mobile-dev...
https://music.apple.com/gb/music-movie/spatial-audio-on-appl...
It’s like they’re warning me the problems with walled gardens.
We have some great news for you – going forward, there will be no extra charge for HD as part of your Amazon Music Unlimited subscription. You will continue to have full access to all of your HD content, but at no additional cost. This change will be reflected in your next billing cycle.
In terms of art, I'm in a kind of wait-and-see mode. Recordings have been doing simple panning for a long time. Artists already have quite a powerful set of tools for creating a soundstage, but I'm curious to see how they take advantage of an even more sophisticated medium.
At a meta level, what's interesting about this is that, although these standards can be adopted by anyone, Apple is (for now at least) basically verticalizing music production. They can pitch to artists that X% of Apple Music customers have spatial-audio-capable devices, Y% have capable headphones, and they can 'sell' the value of the additional Atmos/spatial production work as a function of a well-defined TAM rather than in a vacuum.
If the art side is actually good, fans have a reason to stay in the Apple ecosystem — to hear a better, more true-to-intent version of the music.
The crux of this is: do these features actually produce innovation in music production that artists and fans agree is a way of elevating the form? If not, it's a dud; if so, Apple has a big head start.
Also curious if this will at some point also apply to Apple iTunes Match (the precursor to Apple Music) which lets you own rather than “rent” your music.
Is that right? And/but is it anything like that in practice? Or are studios still mixing for 5.1 and then running some post-process 'Atmos support' that makes the AVR's Atmos light come on but has little 'other' benefit?
Sony 360 Reality Audio https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/what-is-sony-360-reality-au...
I'm not so sure more marketing dollars would change that. Apple has the uncanny ability to generate immense amounts of buzz whenever they announce something.
And there are good reasons to listen to lossy ones instead of lossless ones, you probably can't hear 20kHz+ sound but it will reduce your headroom if it's there, this especially matters when you play it in high volume because the vibration of the 20kHz+ sound cause could cause audio distortion. MQA is the proprietary audio encoding which deals with such problem, although it seems to be a bit debatable.
Lossless formats are especially important for music storage/archive/remixing. But I really can't hear the difference between opus-128k (vbr), mp3-320k (vbr/cbr) and lossless ones.
I just encode lossless music to opus 128k to listen to when it's possible. opus is a very decent audio format, it's wildly used for VoIP. I wouldn't go any higher than 128k for opus because it's recommended in Opus wiki[1], and I've compared the spectrogram between opus 128k (VBR) and mp3 320k (CBR) and there are only very a few of differences.
Not nearly the follow through/uptake. As usual I part blame Google, but in large part, it's just hard to get adoption of good tech!! Both from consumers, but more so, the 3rd party software market.
In general, I'm more excited for computational audio's potential to combine let's say "ad hoc" arrangements of speakers, for it's ability to acoustically map out rooms & deliberately create sound fields, than I am these kind of top down, high control systems like Atmos or VR where a heavily constrained, normalized set of speakers is used to recreate one specific audio experience. It feels like we're at 3D VR concert again, where you get to stand in one spot & look around. Immersive, so long as you are ok taking the role of a frozen obelisk in the scene.
[1] https://developers.google.com/vr/discover/spatial-audio
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWbaEr_mXRE
[3] https://googlechrome.github.io/omnitone/
[4] https://audioxpress.com/article/google-discovers-ambisonics-...
https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/smart_products/sp_frames...
Knowing Apple, I think they probably wanted to offer lossless but the record companies are still paranoid about lossless copies... philistines.
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.
Dynamic range in audio matters only if you actually have some. It's absolutely possible to have 16/24 or more bits of dynamic range available but have the music be pushed so hot as to not use more than a few actual bits. The test you linked is just an example of such music. Regardless, it's easily discernible, as the loudness is not matched between the test samples. I don't even need to listen more than 0.5s to get to 99.95% confidence.
Existing spatial audio on iOS+AirPods puts the center channel (dialog) coming from your device, which makes sense since you're actively looking at it.
But I listen to music while walking around the house. I'm constantly changing orientation.
Does this mean the center channel will always be directly in front of me and therefore the "band" will always be moving/panning with me?
That seems like it would destroy a big part of the spatial audio appeal in movies, that the sound stays in the same physical location when you move your head. But if they don't, how do they decide where the sound comes from?
It doesn't do this directly. It resets the center when you keep your head still. Your head stays still when you're watching a video on your phone, so it sets the center to where your phone is. Try looking away from your phone after it centers the audio on your phone. After a few seconds, you'll hear the center "move" to where you're currently looking.
Maybe a bit like this (campy, I know): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgeFdOayeaw
Drives me nuts that Spotify's works so well and Apple Music (by the company that invented handoff) doesn't have it at all.
Apparently this took them a few year to get out.
I also wonder what the fuck they're doing over there. It really feels like they have like 2 junior developers working for them.
Aside: Also there's a ton of bugs, very poor job on the QA side of Apple Music
Spotify has designed this feature amazingly. Sometimes, I wonder why companies don't steal good ideas from each other more often, it seems like Apple has just refused to implement this terrific user experience.
Still, I prefer Apple Music's album-focused library to Spotify's playlist-focused approach.
https://twitter.com/olilarkin/status/1353171949204221953?s=2...
Spatial audio looks... gimmicky? Surround sound recordings have been available to consumers for over fifty years, yet they remain niche. I'm biased though as I've only purchased high-end stereo headphones.
I had to drop Tidal after trying for a month. CarPlay was a disaster, it just didn’t work well, very laggy, things didn’t always play, it wasn’t great about handling offline playlists.
Separately, they will log you out randomly, locking you out of your offline library. Spotify has never done this to me. I had to buy WiFi on a flight, unnecessarily, to unlock the offline library that I painstakingly downloaded earlier that day.
They really meant, "able to hear the exact same recording that the artists created in the studio." They didn't mean, "able to hear the exact same music that the artists created in the studio."
But even this isn't true. Many people can't hear the entire range of a recording, anyway.
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.
“How can I listen to Dolby Atmos music?
All Apple Music subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV can listen to thousands of Dolby Atmos music tracks using any headphones (emphasis mine). When you listen with compatible Apple or Beats headphones, Dolby Atmos music plays back automatically when available for a song. For other headphones, go to Settings > Music > Audio and set Dolby Atmos to Always On. You can also hear Dolby Atmos music using the built‑in speakers on a compatible iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, or HomePod, or by connecting your Apple TV 4K to a compatible TV or audiovisual receiver.”
I've seen a lot of BS marketing stuff with stereo + some effects being labelled as 5.1 or 7.1.
What is Dolby Atmos? I went to https://www.dolby.com/technologies/dolby-atmos/ but it doesn't really tell you. In my dreams it is music recorded with surround channels and then an technology that plays it back through two speakers using an IMU so you can turn your head and hear different stuff. In reality, it's probably a BS effect... somebody, please reply if you actually know. (Not guess, actually know. Futile, I know -- I'm going to get lots of guesses as replies because that's what always happens on HN.)
A long time ago, surround was based on how the wires were hooked up, so first we had 2 channels, then 2.1, 5.1, etc. So your recording might have a left, right, rear channel, but the channels had to be globally defined and premixed. Your audio file would say “play A out of the speaker, B out the right speaker.”
Atmos is redoing that for digital, so you can say that a channel or sound is positioned at a point in space, and your receiver or device figures out which speakers to use to present it. Your audio file says “play A 10’ left of the listener, play B 10’ right of the user.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos says it's a format that stores up to 128 audio channels with 3d spatial information for each. Pretty cool!
Also how much of the Apple Music library is actually spatial audio? It’s not a great experience when only a subset of videos have the full experience for example
Be careful with your data plan :)
https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/6/9680140/chris-montgomery-...
As far as I know, none of Apple's first-party headphones support more than 256 kbit/s AAC.
Wow, I can finally justify upgrading my iPhone charging cable to gold plated, low-oxygen wires.
Maybe, in the same way we've seen artists go back and remaster entire collections, we will see them do something similar for atoms?
The pros / geeks are having more influence on Apple's product strategy.
I thought most people would be listening to their own curated collection of mostly Bandcamp stuff, plus a bunch of exclusive vinyl and cassette releases. I didn’t realize that older folks (i.e. over 35) are still using services like Spotify and Apple Music!
Absolutely fucking garbage.
Sounds like they're bringing nothing but more data consumption to the table.
iTunes used too, I know the old iPods used too.
Edit: Seems they are using their own format ALAC, sad but not surprising
> Apple Music will also make its catalog of more than 75 million songs available in Lossless Audio. Apple uses ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) to preserve every single bit of the original audio file.
> Apple Music announces Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos; will bring Lossless Audio to entire catalog
This would not only help with music practice, karaoke,
BBC Philharmonic binaural recordings:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/experience-classical-bbc-philh...
The spatial sound implementation on the EarPods pro is amazing. When I first tried them with my iPad I had to take them off several times to make sure the sound was coming from the headphones. I can only assume this will be as good.
When you listen to an LP you can hear cracks and pops. But when you sit in a concert-hall you can hear people coughing. You can sometimes hear people talking.
You can hear reverberation of the hall, that is not natural is it? It does not come from the players' instruments.
How much enjoyment does it take away from you if the music is not absolutely perfectly rendered the way it sounded in the concert hall?
At home when you listen to your super-stereoes you can hear sounds from the building, sounds from the street and sound of the wind and rain. Does it kill your enjoyment?