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iOS 14.6 Beta 1 Code Hints at Upcoming HiFi Apple Music Support
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I think they're referring to "High Fidelity" digital encoding that's "lossless" - ie, a complete preservation of the original digital source file, as opposed to the "lossy" encoding that's used today - which is 3-5x more space efficient because it discards parts of the sound our ears are not likely to notice is gone.
Most people can't tell a high quality Lossy encoding from a lossless one, simply due to the low-fidelity headphones and speakers they're most likely to use. But those that can (or convince themselves they can) are usually quite interested in the subject as a hobby.
Check out - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics if you want to learn more about how digital audio is stored and https://www.whathifi.com/ if this topic of high-quality digital sound is something that intrigues you!
This seems like the most logical expectation. Hopefully unlike 4K, I’ll be able to save offline copies too?
If you really think you can hear the difference between a good mp3 and lossless, test yourself:
www.npr.org
For 99,9% of the population it is completely pointless... I'd say I have very good hearing (and almost perfect pitch), I managed to guess 4/6 correct (with good headphones) and even then I wasn't sure for the most parts.
How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?
A hi-def test for your ears (and your audio equipment): Listen to these songs and see if you can tell the difference between an MP3 and an uncompressed audio file.
www.npr.org
For 99,9% of the population it is completely pointless... I'd say I have very good hearing (and almost perfect pitch), I managed to guess 4/6 correct (with good headphones) and even then I wasn't sure for the most parts.
Hi-Fi has always been short for High Fidelity, as in a high quality reproduction of the originally recorded sound.
In old-school daily use it came however to refer to audio components, where separates typically had individually higher quality components than integrated units that instead came at a lesser cost
Nowadays there is much higher focus on streaming bitrate, lossly vs lossless compression algorithms, etc, than on components
When Apple launches a Hi-Fi tier, I'm sure they're talking about the available quality of the source audio that is offered to end-users and not audio components nor what you eventually choose to reproduce / play it on
Part of me wonders if the upcoming '3rd Gen' AirPods are in actuality a 2nd Gen AirPods Pro. Seems more likely that the Pros would be released with the announcement of a new hifi Apple Music option. The idea of changing the shape of standard AirPods to look like APP has always seemed strange to me. I guess we'll see. ??♂️
I'm interested in "hi-fi" as I already primarily listen to lossless music and have various DACs and amps that are compatible with higher bitrates and more advanced formats like MQA and DSD. I personally don't understand the point of hi-fi exclusively on AirPods as I don't think they would allow one to hear the already subtle differences between formats (AirPods Max being the only ones that really could). I'm all for a hi-fi tier (seems that more streaming services are getting serious about lossless music) but not if it can't be used with any "hi res" compatible DAC that I own like the iFi Zen.
Hey thanks for this link! Super excited to try it outIf you really think you can hear the difference between a good mp3 and lossless, test yourself:
How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?
A hi-def test for your ears (and your audio equipment): Listen to these songs and see if you can tell the difference between an MP3 and an uncompressed audio file.
For 99,9% of the population it is completely pointless... I'd say I have very good hearing (and almost perfect pitch), I managed to guess 4/6 correct (with good headphones) and even then I wasn't sure for the most parts.
Well I'm an old guy too, and you miss the point. Music streaming services mostly compress the music (lossy) for streaming, a few services TIDAL, soon to be Spotify, and if this rumor is correct, Apple Music (there are others). HiFi streams are not lossy, or are much less lossy. For example, SBC is a pretty bad codec to stream music over your bluetooth to speakers and/or headphones, as is AAC on Android. AAC on Apple is considered as good as 320 OGG used by Spotify, and as good as aptx, but still they reduce the audio stream by compression and removing what the algorithms determine can't be heard anyway. HiFi refers to the less lossy ways of sending the music. many vendors have less lossy, or zero lossy, formats.
Does it matter? Probably not, unless you are talking about the crappy low end codecs. The better versions provide adequate detail and resolution for most ears (Music is pretty low in frequency in general <12000 kHz, although audiophiles will tell you there are harmonics with push the spectrum up to 20000khz). Most people can't hear the difference, but the HiFi enthusiasts, will swear they can. Of course being old, our ears have decreased sensitivity and frequency response - pity us
Uninformed posts like this are really, really entertaining.
Where did you read that? The meaning of "Hi-Fi equipment" hasn't changed since the 70s. It doesn't refer to things being modular, it refers to "above standard" quality, and always has. Modularity is just a consequence of wanting to pick and choose the best components.
Nobody has re-inventing anything. And it's a quite obvious name to pick for increased streaming quality, as is evident by the fact that both Tidal and Spotify use the same term.
Apple is late but welcome. i hope for an Apple Music Connect on ATV (that means controlled by iPhone iPad) with premium codecs (that means HighRes).thx.
That would really suck if HiFi was only on the AirPods 3. I guess I get it if they need to deliver the audio over WiFi instead of Bluetooth, but it would be a disappointment.
Surely it’ll be available on the AirPods Max at least wired and to other devices through Airplay.
Surely it’ll be available on the AirPods Max at least wired and to other devices through Airplay.
As evident on every comment section about Apple Music, there clearly are two camps that Apple is catering to -those that love in-ear and those that want on-ear/over-ear.
It makes perfect sense for Apple to update the regular AirPods with better sound quality as next to no other company offers anything high-end and in the on-ear “EarPods”-style of headset without it being wired. All other companies are putting out in-ear buds with silicone tips and ANC to compete with AirPods Pro.
But there’s a huge market of people that for many valid reasons prefer the “EarPods” style on-ear headsets but are now limited to AirPods 1st and 2nd gen as there are only a very limited selection of high-end products that feature the same form factor.
AirPods Pro are still too new to get a replacement in my opinion and will probably not be updated till late 2021 at the earliest. They are still just too popular and aren’t really being undermined by the competition just yet.
can we get a digital distribution method for 5.1 music so I can stop having too rip Blu Rays?
What about the iTunes bought music, any chance we get a free HiFi upgrade like they did with the Movies HD/4K?
„Accompanying code within the beta suggests that HiFi streaming could be limited to only certain AirPods“
Ahh I see, they are building up a new anticompetitive business type interlocking.
Ahh I see, they are building up a new anticompetitive business type interlocking.
Well I think they might be reffering to the dac that are in the airpods/headphones, it is rather useless to fed high-res high sample rate bitstreams to a 16 bit dac ( nit shore if a dac designed to handke 44.1 kilosamples/second can hanke anything more without distorting the output
Well said. TIDAL pays their artists well compared to lots of companies.
I used TIDAL HiFi and switched back to Apple Music almost a week ago so the timing of Apple Music HiFi could not be better.
If HiFi audio will works with mine HomePods it would be just great and strange Apple had discontinued speakers before it. It could be a killer feature for many.
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Music on Apple devices goes way back. I'm old enough to remember the first CD-ROM (SCSI based) back in 1989. Those first units mounted an audio CD to the desktop and you could literally drag songs to the hard drive. It was a cool feature and Apple even invented a file format for it called AIFF. The problem is that AIFF music files were usually 40-50 MB in size. That may not sound like a lot now, but back then the biggest hard drives in a Mac II were 80 MB, so two songs could fill up the whole thing.
Fast forward to the 90s and the MP3 format became the rage. You could take a 40MB music file and compress is down to 2 MB for a typical 128kbit file. With sizes that small (or smaller if you choose crappier compression), you could not only store all your CDs on a typical hard drive of the day, but you could even easily trade music, even on dial-up services. The downside was that lossy compression did degrade the quality of the music, but if you weren't listening on nice equipment (or just didn't care), then it was perfectly fine for you.
By the end of the 90s, a new format called FLAC was born, directed at audiophiles. The idea was to compress the music as best as possible biasing itself toward quick decompression. These files usually only have the size of an AIFF file, but the music quality didn't differ from the original CD it was ripped from.
But piracy was ravaging the music industry by 2001 when Apple introduced the iPod. Remember "1000 songs in your pocket"? Those original iPods had tiny 5 and 10 GB hard drives which made this possible combined with a new audio format from the same company who invented MP3 in the 90s. Called AAC, this format promised similar lossy audio compression with better quality. It was originally at 128kbit files but Apple upgraded that to 256kbit files which is what the iTunes Store and later Apple Music streaming have all supported.
Apple would add its own Lossless file format (ALAC) in 2003 which debuted on the 2003 iPod with dock connector. Interestingly enough, the original iPods between 2001 and 2002 always offered AIFF file compatibility for audiophiles who didn't mind having higher quality but far fewer songs in their pocket.
Not much has changed in the music delivery business since 256k AAC debuted but so much else has changed. Dial up gave way to broadband, and the iPod gave way to the iPhone. 2G cell data networks which barely transferred anything gave way to 3G and widely now, 4G LTE networks. Also, iPods which originally came with 5 gig hard drives now pale in comparison to iPhone 12 which begin with 64GB of flash storage and can be configured up to 256 GB, or even 512GB. To give some context to that, my entire ripped CD collection (30,000+ songs) collected over three decades compressed with ALAC is about 750 GB.
But with streaming, I don't even need that kind of storage on me if I can stream high fidelity lossless music to whereever I am. And in an age where Wifi and 4G LTE communication is everywhere and 5G has been making serious inroads in major cities, there's no excuse not to offer higher quality ALAC music when we've been streaming much bigger Youtube and Netflix video files without giving it a second thought. ALAC files on my hard drive are about 20-30 MB in size while AAC files are usually 5-8 MB. ALAC is biggest sure, but these days, it's a difference that doesn't matter much with most cell phone plans.
So CD-quality (16 bit/44.1Khz) ALAC is way overdue. But why stop there? Audiophiles moved on to 24 bit music with sampling rates from 44.1 khz all the way up to 192 or even 384 khz. And if you have the right equipment, the difference is noticeable. Even better, the "right equipment" is well within the reach of many consumers without reaching into lofty audiophile territory. Now what is called in the industry HiRes audio has file sizes from 100-200 MB each or larger. But again, it's still much smaller than video files we consume every day.
And streaming lossless files (FLAC format) have been available for a while from Amazon Music and Qobuz. Tidal offers HiRes music through a lossless format called MQA which is beyond the scope of this discussion.
But the bottom line is that I'd love for Apple to finally offer lossless CD quality music. And we know that Apple has HiRes music in the vaults....they often receive them from the artists before they are compressed to AAC. Will we see either? Time will tell but we've been waiting a decade so far with no luck. Curiously, iTunes (and later Apple Music) has dealt with not only ALAC files with HiRes ALAC for several years on your hard drive with no problems. Even MacOS knows what a FLAC file is and will even play it from the Finder.
Finally there is multi-channel atmospheric music like Sony 360 and Dolby Atmos. Atmos got started as a movie sound platform (lossless and lossy) but recently added music to its features which in the streaming world, is the same lossy format Apple already delivers via the Apple TV 4K. Dolby Atmos music is already a thing with Tidal on the Apple TV 4K assuming you have a proper receiver and speakers or compatible soundbar. Apple could easily deliver Atmos music on Airpod Pros, AirPod Max and HomePods much like they do for movies already.
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