Apple Music Hifi

A few observations on Apple’s big announcement today

A few minutes ago, Apple confirmed the rumours about its Apple Music Hifi offering. According to this press release, the new lossless audio feature, along with support for Dolby Atmos-backed “Spatial Audio,” will be available for subscribers starting next month.

Seeing this, I had a few thoughts — I’ve laid them out below.

1. I’m not sold on Atmos/spatial audio. Apple says that the feature will be enabled on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, as well as the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac. To begin with, I’m not sure how stereo headphones or phone speakers can reproduce Atmos tracks. I would love to check out some spatial audio tracks played through a full-fledged Atmos system, but I’m not holding my breath. The entire thing sounds gimmicky.
2. It sounds like the entirety of the Apple Music catalogue will be available in Lossless format. I’m not sure how Apple pulled this off. Some masters simply aren’t available in this quality. Hifi streaming services like Deezer and Tidal do not have their entire catalogues in lossless format for this reason. It would be interesting to see what Apple did here.
3. While the Lossless tier offers CD Quality (16/44.1) as a baseline, it looks like they are going to have content all the way up to 24/192. If memory serves right, Qobuz is the only other streaming service that has such an offering. This is something I’m quite excited about, and while I won’t claim to be able to hear the difference between 16/44.1 and 24/192, just knowing it’s there feels… good.
4. Apple has confirmed that customers will not have to pay extra to access the Lossless tier. This is wonderful. In Sri Lanka, this means you can access these new features for the same $2.99/month. Other lossless streaming services will set you back a lot more — Deezer by $8.99/month, Tidal and Qobuz by $19.99/month.
5. Apple is using their own ALAC encoding for their catalogue, as opposed to the popular and FLAC encoding used by many other services. I don’t know if this may result in changes in the audio quality — we’re yet to find out.

For now, I’m reasonably excited to test these features in June. I hope Apple won’t disappoint.