Re: Apple moves to lossless audio is really making more audiofools
Reply #68 – 2021-06-08 14:46:17
the reality is bandwidth is cheap now. SSD prices have come right down, unlimited data plans have made a come back (at least here in the UK) at reasonable prices and 5G being rolled out rapidly. The question is... why wouldn't you listen to music in lossless ? I also attest to 256kbps AAC being largely suitable for most headphones and setups, and can be compared to CD Quality. But in a world where bluetooth headphones are beocming the norm and rely on AAC or APT-X, having the source content in lossless to restore the origional PCM stream is now ideal to avoid transcoding issues. Especially as there is no cost... I really don't get all the negativity. the reality is bandwidth and storage is cheap now. SSD prices have come right down, unlimited data plans have made a come back (at least here in the UK) at reasonable prices and 5G is being rolled out rapidly. The question is... why wouldn't you listen to music in lossless ? I also attest to 256kbps AAC being largely suitable for most headphones and setups, and can be compared to CD Quality. But in a world where bluetooth headphones are beocming the norm and rely on AAC or APT-X, having the source content in lossless to restore the origional PCM stream before sending over bluetooth is ideal to avoid transcoding issues. Since the bottleneck is no longer your internet connection or 8GB MP3 player, but the bluetooth link to your headphones and this is where lossy will now be best placed going forward. Especially as there is no cost... I really don't get all the negativity. This is where I think the value is. It's difficult to tell how recompression of one lossy codec into another lossy coded might affect sound. Different services uses differentr codecs. Apple uses AAC, Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis, Amazon Music uses MP3 and I don't know what YouTube music is using. Then you have the Bluetooth side of things: LDAC, AAC, Apt-X, SBC and LC3. You turn on lossless audio and you don't have to worry about what kind of compression artifacts mights be created when yuou convert from Ogg Vorbis to LDAC. I'm sure you could ABX a lot of this stuff and figure it out for yourself, but why go through the work, when you have unlimited data and an option for lossless audio. Apple enabled lossless audio on my devices this morning. I have two quality options: 24/48 or 24/192. I wish there was an option for 16/44.1. yep exactly this. supposedly the AAC encoder is quite transparent, even when decoded and sent back into an AAC encoder , it kind of "sees" that it was AAC and won't introduce further artifacts but i think this comes down to the bitrate of the origional encode and implementation of the encoding/decoding (although theoretically MP4 audio doesn't suffer this variance like MP3 did). Just for complete peace of mind lossless is the way IMO as fibre broadband, 5G etc... kind of make lossy compression less necssary for soruce content. But I guess they should keep AAC as an option (or default) for now as not all have access to fast internet for streaming, and that way everyone can be happy. Btw might be able to answer that question, if you tap on the lossless icon when playing a song it mentions the bit-depth and sample rate, i'm surprised at how many are still just 16/44.1 (not necssarily a problem) but in ALAC, I've seen quite a 24-bit/44.1, it's about 50/50, typically the ones with the higher bit depth have the icons for both lossless AND "apple digital master" ... but even then not always The bit i'm baffled with is how iOS doesn't let you see or set the sample rate of a USB-C DAC. There aren't that many hi-res songs yet from what I can tell and not sure how much I care about sample rates above 44.1kHz but be nice to know what is iOS is actually doing under the hood... but thats iOS for you