Apple announces lossless Apple Music is coming in June at no added cost

[Arika]

46 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

It's funny people mocking Apple and praising Spotify and Amazon Music for inclusion of lossless/higher quality music yet everyone is trapped in the very same problem.

Spotify and Amazon don't make $500 headphones and market them as:

 

Quote

a perfect balance of exhilarating high-fidelity audio and the effortless magic of AirPods. The ultimate personal listening experience is here.

it's the whole "you can't connect your phone and laptop together with the included cables" all over again.

 

Apple are slipping. they market everything as being the best, but then fail on the actual release.

 

 

Also any company that markets their products as "magic" can shove it.

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

"no additional cost"

 

until they release a "new and improved" version of airpods....with an "optional" cable (because they will have to)

 

 

find it funny that even their $500 Max's, that CAN be wired, won't even support it...

Because the current Bluetooth standard doesn't support lossless audio yet. It's not Apple's problem.

[RejZoR]

1 minute ago, Arika S said:

Spotify and Amazon don't make $500 headphones and market them as:

 

it's the whole "you can't connect your phone and laptop together with the included cables" all over again.

 

Apple are slipping. they market everything as being the best, but then fail on the actual release.

 

 

Also any company that markets their products as "magic" can shove it.

That still doesn't change the fact EVERYONE is having the same problem now that EVERYONE has jumped into the wireless craze. Selling ones or not. You're just gloating they do.

[Arika]

31 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

Because the current Bluetooth standard doesn't support lossless audio yet. It's not Apple's problem.

Bluetooth yes, but the MAX headphones that can be wired aren't even up to scratch, so yes, that IS apple's problem.

 

I have no doubt they will release brand new fancy headphones and market them as the best headphones for lossless music because magic.

 

EDIT: also if i remember correctly (and i do) apple was the one to remove the headphone jack on all their phones, so they will also likely release a fancy USB/lightning AirDAC to go with their new headphones.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

 What good is if AAC Lossless or FLAC are superior when they just aren't supported by pretty much anything.

Because they require more expensive/powerful hardware. Did you know that you needed roughly a Pentium 75 back in the day to play a MP3, back when the average PC was either a 486 or a Pentium non-MMX

 

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

 

I'd love to use HEIC photos as standard, but since only thing that supports it is my iPhone and as preview only on Windows, it's useless. Same issue is with AAC or OGGG or whatever audio format. Or photo formats. N matter how superior or inferior they are, how widely supported they are is the only important factor. Same reason why SMS is still around. It's garbage by all standards, but it's the only way you can reliably send text message to anyone without worrying if they'll be able to see it or not.

HEIC is supported on Windows if you have the codec installed.

 

 

At one point I had this enabled on the iphone, but because I couldn't install this codec on office machines, I had to switch it back to JPG.

 

That said, I don't use "windows" tools for stuff like video and photos, I'll use something else. the codec's only for showing the preview. That's the point.

 

[Bombastinator]

5 hours ago, Kisai said:

MP3 compression is terrible, and the better your listening equipment and hearing, the worse it sounds. I remember when MP3's started being the de-facto music sharing format in the late 90's and every single one of them had warbling noises from CD rip's, all due to using the same crappy reference encoder. Some people were like, "320kpbs, basically lossless then", no no. I can tell you immediately when I'm listening to an MP3 because the stereo sound has been collapsed, warbles, destroyed high and low frequencies because "nobody can hear it" and other artifacts. Ogg vorbis continued this trend.

 

Unfortunately lossy music always has artifacts to it, almost entirely due to the encoder stripping bits at a filtering stage, which might work for loud audio, but destroys things like podcasts and classical music.

 

So I'm pretty quick to call BS when people go "you can't hear the difference", because not everything is going to be about frequency range or volume. Settling for rubbish headphones or speakers, of course you're not going to be able to hear it. Like I also hear the difference when people use terrible microphones, because they quite literately sound like they're on a 80's analog telephone. 

 

Yeti X - 24-bit, 48khz or 44.1khz Stereo are the only options.

Jabra call center headset - 16-bit 16khz mono. (Tape Recorder quality)

 

Does everyone notice the difference between lossy audio and lossless audio? No, and those people who can't tell, shouldn't be making decisions about it based on their personal experience. You could probably do a double-blind test and find that everyone who has never listened to loud music/been to a concert/club can actually hear the difference.

Also there’s age.  People lose hearing as the strands that hold the doors of the biological amplifiers in the inner ear break.  High pitches tend to go first.  It’s actually been used as a sort of sonic young people repellant in some areas. They play super high pitched sound over speakers that young people are annoyed by but older people aren’t because they can’t hear it. 

[H713]

22 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I think you're being very generous with that bit depth. 

From what I've heard, cassettes were typically only able to achieve 9 bits of bit depth when they were in perfect condition, and if it was some mixtape some friend had made on a cassette deck then you would be lucky if it even reached 6 bits of bit depth.

The 13-14 bit depth was if you had some of the best recording equipment available near the end of the analog era, and applied noise reduction. Then digital tape killed it.

I'm referring to the 15 IPS reel-to-reel machines used for recording, not cassettes. There's a pretty huge difference in performance between a well-aligned Studer A820 and even the best cassette decks.

 

Digital tape didn't really kill reel-to-reel machines. Yes, DAT based machines certainly saw plenty of popularity, and some studios adopted DASH machines from Sony / Studer / 3M, but analog reel-to-reel was largely replaced by DAWs and hard disk recorders like the Radar machines. There were a lot of studios that kept using their 2" multitracks throughout the 1990s, and some continue to use them to this day, Electrical Audio being a prime example.

 

 

 

 

[Video Beagle]

17 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Also there’s age.  People lose hearing as the strands that hold the doors of the biological amplifiers in the inner ear break.  High pitches tend to go first. 

Yeah..and other stuff... a fever I had a number of years ago burned out stuff in my audial canals so I don't have perfect hearing :(...still I can save a lot of money on headphones as super high def are worthless to me

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Video Beagle said:

Yeah..and other stuff... a fever I had a number of years ago burned out stuff in my audial canals so I don't have perfect hearing :(...still I can save a lot of money on headphones as super high def are worthless to me

Another example is noise related hearing loss.  I’ve got a friend that has “cookie bite” hearing loss. He lost sensitivity at the registers the machines he worked around for years made noise at.  The term “cookie bite comes from the way the graph of the sensitivity looks. 

[Stahlmann]

23 hours ago, RejZoR said:

What good is if AAC Lossless or FLAC are superior when they just aren't supported by pretty much anything.

I actually never ran into a device that can't play FLAC files. My phones, TVs, PCs have can all play FLAC, so what'S your point in "they aren't supported"? And you can easily get a huge library of FLAC audio when using Amazon Music HD, where basically all music is FLAC.

[n0stalghia]

On 5/19/2021 at 11:13 AM, RejZoR said:

What good is if AAC Lossless or FLAC are superior when they just aren't supported by pretty much anything.

iOS had AAC Lossless suport since I don't even remember how long, and native FLAC support for 3-4 major OS releases.

 

Before that, you easily could use apps that provided their own embedded FLAC codec, I've been listening to FLACs on my iPhone 3GS back in the day using one.