Apple Music High Res

[wklie (Peter Lie)]

@wklie

Apple Music Server -(1)-> iOS Apple Music app as AirPlay Sender -(2)-> AirPlay Receiver

@Mike_Scheinkman

it only had AirPlay 1 and upsampled even your lossy aac iTunes files to ALAC.

@Phil_Ryan

My speculation is that in this scenario you’re getting an AAC stream from the service, then it gets converted to ALAC and is sent to Lumin.

I have proven both steps (1) and (2) for 16/44.1 are lossless by playing Fairytales (MQA) from iPadOS 14.6 → AirPlay1 Lumin (at max volume) USB output → Full MQA DAC that shows MQA.

AirPlay2 to other streamers become AAC.