What I was getting at was apple know whether you are listening on your phone or not. And whether you are listening on AirPods or not. So why bother sending all those high res bits, especially over a mobile network, when it will just and up as AAC. When you’re listening at home they could send the high res. Qobuz let’s you control the resolution that get sent to different devices,
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“Spopple“. Obviously.
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Interesting. That sounds like fuel for a fire that’s already pretty hot. 
Nah, Applefy !
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Close. Apple-Fi.
i-Fi - they just need to buy that domain
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Hi-fi on my AirPods Pro? I thought that was not possible.
Maybe they’ll make iTunes natively compatible with FLAC. Finally.
Sort of wondering the same. How will Apple handle your “merged library “ ? Will it be uploaded to their servers uncompressed?
Apple Music used to be Mog, which then was bought my Apple, became Beats, and was ruined. Mog was wonderful.
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There is no reason Apple can’t increase the specs of a new iDevice to stream lossless audio to your bluetooth devices, or WiFi Devices, or whatever else you may want. And no reason it couldn’t work like the Qobuz app which lets you choose which bit rate to playback.
LDAC is lossless at CD quality (or can be), but the receiving decompression technology is proprietary, like MQA, if that matters.
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Thanks, I know nothing about the technical details. I am a firm believer that if they want to, they will figure out a way.
Either way, I think it will be what I call consumer level hi-fi, probably consisting of 99% cd quality or less. Qobuz will still be audiophile tier Hi Fi.
Yep! Think AirPods Max. They might come up with something along the lines of “Apple Music Studio Masters” or similar Marketing Blabla (they used these terms before), in the end they might give us near CD-quality or similar with a bit of DSP-Trickery. I would wonder if they go all the way up to 96/24 or 192/24, that’s not Apple’s Style. They might nudge the quality over Bluetooth and AirPlay 2 a little and call it a day. In this way they don’t need to up the prices but the quality might be “as good as or better” then cd-quality, at least when used with Apple-Gear, that’s my guess.
One more thing: Don’t underestimate Apples Audio-Folks, they have great talent there and could easily develop some quality APPLE Origami which blows MQA out of the water. And if my guess is right I also think they will add quality audio like Spatial Audio for Films and TV-Shows and therefore will go in one way or another proprietary, Apple-Style as always.
For me: I booked 1 year Qobuz and Roon last month, and also have one Shoe in Apple’s Camp with an Apple ONE Subscription. So, yeah, I might give up Qobuz next year. But Roon? I guess not.
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You can’t change the circuitry in the current devices that can only decode AAC320 (From memory).
It’s quite possible that the Airpods Max have additional processing power that Apple has decided not to turn on yet as they would not want anyone else to be able to make use of it.
MQA is in essence a compression technique for shrinking the bandwidth (please no flame wars) that is being used to send data from the streaming platform to the streamer and at that point Apple is fully in control of all endpoints so could possibly do something, but many of the new services it plays to might have issues with this (Echo, Sonos, Google) unless it was converted back to ALAC/FLAC
LDAC which is a Sony technology that is baked into recent Android devices gets close to lossless, but is not itself lossless to try and fit into the Bluetooth bandwidth limitations. I have used it on a couple of headphones and it is great, so there is something Apple could use if they weren’t so into platform lock in, but I seriously doubt that. AptX HD also sounds pretty good, but I doubt that they would license that either.
I used to be a huge Apple fan, but moved away from some of their devices due to the closed ecosystem developments and I only see this getting worse.
I will watch the developments in streaming with interest though I am not an Apple music subscriber at the moment.
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What’s the point if true? Getting it to your hifi is just as rubbish as it is with AAC. It’s a walled garden except for the Sonos connection. Being an Android user it useless as most of my audio hear doesn’t support Chromecast. One for Apple lovers only really. At least Spotify is easy to get into a hifi system
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Something like a Bluesound Node 2i supports Airplay 2, Roon Ready, Spotify Connect… all pretty easy, no?
Apple love a walled garden, but with their opening up of Apple music (for Apple that is) it’s going to interesting to see what the support matrix looks like for which services work on what devices.
It’s an area Apple have not traditionally been good at, but the slow rollout of Apple TV+ has shown they can launch this slowly and make it work. The question will be how they can support it over several years across a lot of devices
My guess is it’s only supported on IPhone and Apple TV at the start, but 99% of their user’s are not going to get any benefit with the headphones that have.
Homepod’s, Sonos and and Airplay 2 are the devices outside the iPhone that get it I think as that is the easiest way to deliver it.
Sadly I would say we are a tiny minority in the world of people that listen to music. Most people are walking around streaming Spotify or Apple music through ■■■■■■ little headphones that carry little quality of the streaming in them and don’t care about high resolution music.
Even Sonos have only sold under 20 million units and they are far ahead of everyone else
So I see this as more of a marketing battle, that people like us might benefit from, but I don’t think we are really the target audience.
I’m not even sure if they know the target audience, just that they have to stay at feature parity with each other.
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Take solace in the fact that those ■■■■■■ little headphones are getting better all the time.
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