This is a good description of Chromecast, but AFAIK not Airplay. Airplay senders transmit to receivers over UDP. According to the Wikipedia article:
The streams are transcoded using the Apple Lossless codec
In other words, you can have the best, highly capable, receiver in the world, but the sender has still encoded the audio to 16/44.1.
Apple Music boss has recently said we will see the results of this acquisition in Apple Music early next year. Not only for classical but also jazz and possibly everything (focus on metadata)
Maybe that is when we can also expect new hardware (Airplay3?) for hi-res lossless support? Let’s see !
I’ve already taken several attempts to make friends with Apple Music and I’d also add a subscription if it wasn’t just marketing and many months of waiting.
We’ll update you next year if/when it reaches full potential.
Hopefully they don’t end up being like Amazon Music HD - years of no real improvement in their apps.
Ha ha ha! Here they still haven’t even launched it. Still the rubbish MP3 based service with a very limited catalogue.
Am a roon lifer here. Have about 900 albums of DSD and hi res FLAC in personal library on it.
I’m an exclusive classical and jazz fan. For classical I use IDAGIO, partly because it actually pays the artist a fair value for streaming. That’s something we should all consider: if we all rush to the lowest common price denominator and the artists aren’t paid much, we may not have that much great music left.
Had Qobuz for a while, wasn’t that impressed with their catalogue. For example, many of the month’s Gramophone recommendations weren’t available.
I now use Apple Music for my jazz discovery, IDAGIO for classical discovery and buy CDs or lossless downloads for the albums I like and add to my Roon library. For example, discovered a fabulous new mezzo today on IDAGIO—Fatma Said. Her new album is fab.
So… will IDAGIO survive? I sure hope so.
Interesting, as my experience is that Qobuz actually has a larger catalogue of classical music than Idagio (try to find Concerto Italiano on the Naive label on Idagio or Sofronitsky’s recording of the Mozart piano concertos — you won’t find them). Idagio has an excellent search function, that is true, but big catalogue lacunae.
Not sure I understand your point. UDP, like TCP/IP is a network protocol used to connect the playing device and the apple source. UDP is faster, but lacks such things as guaranteed packet delivery, lost packet retransmission, etc. Device initiating airplay is not involved after handoff.
Current limitation of Airplay. Apple Music supports up to 24-bit /192 kHz directly playing on devices.
“HomePod and HomePod mini currently use AAC to ensure excellent audio quality. Support for lossless is coming in a future software update.”
No details whether this includes airplay changes which could be carried over to other devices. Since they want to increase their services revenue they will need to expand this support to other devices as well. Could be wrong though.
That alone the headline “lossless” for Apple was not yet a sales hit, this message shows today:
Google News - Headlines Germany
Apple Music: Almost 1 year free - also for existing customers
Statistical surveys can also always show market changes. With a few outliers in previous years, new Apple devices continue to download the main competitor’s offering 4 million times a month.
If at the end of the year the customer growth 2021 with / without lossless is to be examined, Apple obviously does not want to simply fall behind with your new course hits.
More music industry news and research e.g. here:
Uwe, thanks for the tip, I was able to get another 2 months Apple Music trial from within Shazam. The weekend will be spent trying lossless streaming via USB, which wasn’t available when I trialed before.
you’re welcome, I think only through free samples can you determine if an offer really meets your needs. My last attempt was not long enough ago to try it again. For me, Apple is the fastest in announcing, but the slowest in implementing. There must be a reason why billions of people with Apple devices don’t use only Apple services. Of course, Apple is also slowly improving many things in its services.
Out of interest how do you connect IDAGIO to you system , I tried it for a while using a Sony Windows tablet via a USB cable , but it was a bit of a lash up.
I now use an iPad so a camera kit and the same lash up but a bit messy
I agree though a good service , RIP Primephonic 
Data are difficult to interpret. Here’s from Midia Research: “Google’s YouTube Music has been the standout story of the music subscriber market for the last couple of years, resonating both in many emerging markets and with younger audiences across the globe. The early signs are that YouTube Music is becoming to Gen Z what Spotify was to Millennials half a decade ago.” To me this strongly suggests that Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, got it right when he said that 99% of people can’t hear and therefore don’t care about the difference between AAC 256 and lossless. What else would account for You Tube Music’s growing popularity, as its streaming quality caps out at 256 AAC? And what else would account for Spotify’s continuing popularity, even though eight months after announcing that they would offer lossless, nothing’s happened yet?
Difficult to admit for Rooners, but the world is simply not interested in lossless, let alone Hi-Res.
Video?
/10char
Yes, of course, but it’s only certain types of music that benefit from videos – in my opinion, the kind of music that’s too mediocre to stand on its own two feet (or guitars). What kind of music, then, is being promoted by videos, and should we be happy about this?
(PS: the video doesn’t make the sound quality any better.)
That’s right, the mass music market is not yet ready for HiRes, which is probably why Spotify waited and pushed podcasts to the forefront for now. The news in February led Apple and Amazon to react immediately, without really being well prepared.
Here, Roon has a different niche position and two partners.
This horse is well and truly flogged
The answer is no until Apple revise data access ie never
I think we are part of a niche market where Hi-Res streaming services will remain for a while. The big ones are looking after the Air buds type of customers which represent their main market; we aren’t.
