how to listen to lossless audio on phone

[kasdashd]

Besides needing a music streaming service that supports lossless audio, what other requirements are there? 

 

Am thinking stuff like the phone itself, headphones, wired or wireless, and so on?

[DrMacintosh]

If you want lossless audio, your two real options are Tidal and Apple Music. Apple Music has an iOS, Android, Mac, and PC app, all of which can playback lossless audio. To do that, you'll need to be using wired headphones. You'll also need a dedicated DAC (can be connected via USB) to playback Hi-Res Lossless (ALAC up to 24Bit/192KHz), at least on an iPhone. Most devices, flagships anyway, should be able to playback lossless 24Bit/48KHz files natively.

 

The way I listen is my iPhone 13 Pro Max with the Apple Lighting to 3.5mm audio jack adapter connected to my Audio Technica ATH-M50X headphones. My lossless quality is set to 24Bit/48KHz because the apple audio adapter (Lighting and USB-C) support up to that bit rate.

 

With iPhone 15, the USB-C port allows you to use almost any DAC you want, assuming it works with iOS.

 

On my PC I have a little USB audio dac that can do the full 24Bit/192Khz quality.

[Cocococo]

Honestly lossless isn't something you should worry about until you've spent thousands of dollars on some crazy high-end equipment, modern music compression is so good that the quality of mastering is much more important than raw bitrate these days

[DrMacintosh]

11 minutes ago, Cocococo said:

Honestly lossless isn't something you should worry about until you've spent thousands of dollars on some crazy high-end equipment

Except you don't need high end equipment to get a listening experience that is significantly greater than Spotify or YouTube. A $9 adapter and a nice pair of wired headphones is all you actually need to have a superior experience to those options. If you want to splurge, $250 will get you a really great paid of over-ear headphones and a decent USB DAC capable of 24Bit/192Khz.

[Cocococo]

1 hour ago, DrMacintosh said:

Except you don't need high end equipment to get a listening experience that is significantly greater than Spotify or YouTube. A $9 adapter and a nice pair of wired headphones is all you actually need to have a superior experience to those options. If you want to splurge, $250 will get you a really great paid of over-ear headphones and a decent USB DAC capable of 24Bit/192Khz.

You do know how much placebo there is in "telling" the difference between lossless and compressed music right? People with Hifiman HE1000's and thousand dollar dac's struggle to tell the difference between well mastered compressed music and true lossless. Your iPhone dongle and M50X's are not going to do anything better

[DrMacintosh]

3 hours ago, Cocococo said:

You do know how much placebo there is in "telling" the difference between lossless and compressed music right?

No, because the difference in quality is entirely noticeable to anyone with a critical ear.

 

3 hours ago, Cocococo said:

People with Hifiman HE1000's and thousand dollar dac's struggle to tell the difference between well mastered compressed music and true lossless.

Perhaps older people with failing hearing. A well mastered track is incredibly important, but if that master gets shoved down the Spotify pipeline, its going to sound worse than at full lossless quality on Apple Music, it just is. While 256kbps is perfectly fine (this was the previous standard for iTunes purchases), and most won't notice a difference, there is improvement to be had, and Apple and Tidal offer that improvement as part of there service.

 

3 hours ago, Cocococo said:

Your iPhone dongle and M50X's are not going to do anything better

Except they are doing significantly better than someone not streaming at 16Bit/92Khz, and I didn't have to pay anything extra to get that experience, I already had the equipment and the audio quality was a free upgrade.

 

 

What you must realize is that Lossless Audio is no longer a feature used to upsell consumers, it's just the standard for streaming audio in 2024. Or at least it is if you are using a real music streaming service.

[Cocococo]

3 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

No, because the difference in quality is entirely noticeable to anyone with a critical ear.

 

Perhaps older people with failing hearing. A well mastered track is incredibly important, but if that master gets shoved down the Spotify pipeline, its going to sound worse than at full lossless quality on Apple Music, it just is. While 256kbps is perfectly fine (this was the previous standard for iTunes purchases), and most won't notice a difference, there is improvement to be had, and Apple and Tidal offer that improvement as part of there service.

 

Except they are doing significantly better than someone not streaming at 16Bit/92Khz, and I didn't have to pay anything extra to get that experience, I already had the equipment and the audio quality was a free upgrade.

 

 

What you must realize is that Lossless Audio is no longer a feature used to upsell consumers, it's just the standard for streaming audio in 2024. Or at least it is if you are using a real music streaming service.

1: If there wasn't a "MASTERED" logo on whatever track you listen to would you REALLY be able to tell the difference? Whenever i tried i honestly couldn't tell, so i just went for the service i like more.

 

2: Immediately categorising people who have much better audio equipment who can't tell the difference as old with failing hearing doesn't help your case, if anything it projects a bit of insecurity and reassures your blind faith in what you're being served is truly better. Apple Music is alright, i prefer spotify's QOL features and recommendation system. I do also have CD ripped FLAC's of albums i really like, Tidal is a hot mess that it's developers refuse to fix, the improvement you believe to be there is pretty likely just placebo (i have a hard time with placebo sometimes)

 

3: Of course lossless is better than 16Bit music, modern music compression has gotten so good that any "improvement" you used to get from lossless (It is a fairly recent change) is limited more by the mastering than simple file size, like i originally said, it isn't important until you've spent a lot of money on equipment good enough to reveal flaws in files (no you won't get that with an apple dongle and some mediocre undetailed closed backs, that is just straight up placebo)

 

4: Lossless is literally being used as a feature to upsell Tidal and Apple Music, Lossless has been the big draw of Tidal for pretty much all of Tidals existence (along with their more generous payouts to artists) Apple Music pushes "lossless" to advertise all the time, despite how the majority of the userbase is using airpods that literally won't hear any difference, the standard for music streaming is just music, regardless of kbps (Youtube is the popular platform for music and their audio compression is INTENSE, so long as the track is well mastered it will still sound decent, don't believe the marketing, if it sounds good then it is good) 

[Stahlmann]

On 2/24/2024 at 7:55 AM, DrMacintosh said:

No, because the difference in quality is entirely noticeable to anyone with a critical ear.

And what does critical ear even mean? 

 

On 2/24/2024 at 7:55 AM, DrMacintosh said:

Perhaps older people with failing hearing. A well mastered track is incredibly important, but if that master gets shoved down the Spotify pipeline, its going to sound worse than at full lossless quality on Apple Music, it just is. While 256kbps is perfectly fine (this was the previous standard for iTunes purchases), and most won't notice a difference, there is improvement to be had, and Apple and Tidal offer that improvement as part of there service.

 

Except they are doing significantly better than someone not streaming at 16Bit/92Khz, and I didn't have to pay anything extra to get that experience, I already had the equipment and the audio quality was a free upgrade.

There have been many threads about this on the forums with people disagreeing that there is or isn't a noticeable difference.

 

In my own opinion there isn't a noticeable difference to Spotify, YouTube Music or Tidal when it comes to audio quality. I've also done blind ABX tests online and I was never able to reliably tell which music file was compressed or uncompressed.

 

And even if there is a small difference, what does it matter? Compression mostly impacts the top freqency range. For example if you're in your mid twenties and have the normal amount of age-related hearing loss you can't hear past 16kHz anyway.

 

On 2/24/2024 at 7:55 AM, DrMacintosh said:

What you must realize is that Lossless Audio is no longer a feature used to upsell consumers, it's just the standard for streaming audio in 2024. Or at least it is if you are using a real music streaming service.

The standard is compression, as can be seen when looking at music streaming market share, where spotify is still by far the biggest provider. Unless you want to leave out the biggest provider as a "real streaming service" for the sake of your argument. If it really was that important that it could be classified as a necessity, then Spotify would either have intoduced their own lossless streaming subscription or they wouldn't have this much market share.

 

 

 

All in all in my opinion even compressed streaming from YouTube or Spoitfy is good enough, even when using higher-end audio gear. And even if there are miniscule differences, they won't change the way you listen to or feel about a song. And that's only IF you can even hear them. And that's a very big "if".

[GoldenSound]

On 2/24/2024 at 12:54 AM, kasdashd said:

Besides needing a music streaming service that supports lossless audio, what other requirements are there? 

 

Am thinking stuff like the phone itself, headphones, wired or wireless, and so on?

The main issues are that Android typically resamples all audio to 48khz and cannot play lossless files bitperfect (ie: without resampling/changing the audio data).

TIDAL has gotten around this using a custom USB driver that allows you to give the app exclusive control of the DAC and bypass this issue.

You can do the same with Tidal, Qobuz, and local files (plus add a bunch of extra features like EQ) using USB Audio Player Pro

 

I've actually made a couple videos on the topic which might help: