Apple Lossless and Apple Spatial

Some of you may have noticed that Apple Music introduced a new lossless audio streaming service this month at no extra cost to subscribers. Having been a niche filled in recent years by the likes of Qobuz and Tidal, there have been moves or announcements by both Amazon and Spotify of late to make lossless a more mainstream expectation. Apple needed to do something or risk being left behind. However, it remains a strange move – all the Apple Fanbois I know listen to Apple Music either on Sonos speakers or via some variant of Airpods (based on Bluetooth, BLE). Both of which don’t support Apple lossless. Sonos may do so in the future (don’t hold your breath on the timing) but Bluetooth simply doesn’t have the bandwidth for lossless – it was after all designed for low power applications to save battery life. Wireless Airpods will never support lossless – is Apple going to introduce a bunch of wired Beats headphones to support its lossless tier?

The real question of course is whether lossless would actually make a difference to most people. If you have a decent home audio system with no background distractions and you sit down to deliberately listen and focus on the music, sure you can hear the difference between lossless and lossy sources. The original aim of lossy codecs like MP3 and AAC was to reduce file size for storing digital music on iPods and such. Hard-disks and flash were expensive 20 years ago and reducing the file size by 10x was not to be laughed at. Lossy compression works by throwing away audio information that humans cannot hear under certain conditions. If an orchestra is playing full force then the sounds of a mouse nibbling at crumbs under the floorboards at the back of the theater will be inaudible so there’s not much point in including them in the recording. Audiophiles with golden ears tend to snub this off, claiming to be able to hear everything. Realistically, if you’re listening to audio in a car with engine noise, road noise and the background hustle of other traffic, you are simply not going to hear the difference between lossless and lossy. I’d argue the same is true with any earbuds even if there’s no background hustle, because the tiny transducers in the pods just don’t do justice to a lossless source.

These days, storage costs have come down drastically so lossy is not really needed any more from that perspective. However, a 10x reduction in streaming bandwidth is still relevant – not only because of data rates per se but because of the effects on battery life. Bluetooth audio is low bandwidth for a reason – most BLE devices are on battery power (with tiny batteries) so it makes sense to try and maximize longevity. Would you rather pods that last for 5 hours of listening time on a single charge or ‘better’ sound quality but only an hour of resilience? Right.

There are parallels with video resolution. Of course you can see that the picture on a 4K TV is higher resolution than mere HD if you look at the screen from inches away. It’s why in stores they often put TVs on display in narrow aisles so you are forced to watch from a very short distance. Now take one of those TVs and put it at the end of a corridor in a hotel. Step back 30 feet and see if you can still notice the improved 4K resolution over regular HD. Didn’t think so. Lossless audio is similar. Under ideal circumstances, sure you can likely hear some difference. In the real world of listening on less than stellar equipment and in less than ideal surroundings, you won’t.

We also have to compare apples to apples here (pun intended). That’s where the audio master comes into play. If the lossless file is based on a better mastering of the original recording, it may sound better outright – simply because it’s a better recording. A lossy release based on the same master would also sound better to the same degree. The sales trick often lies in having different masters for the lossless vs lossy releases so that punters cannot make a fair 1:1 comparison. The lossless sounds better to the lossy for a different reason not related to the codec.

The other side to the Apple announcement was support for ‘Spatial Audio’ (Dolby Atmos) in Apple Music. Airpods can handle that so it’s a consolation prize for those locked into the Apple ecosystem. Originally developed for cinema, Atmos is an object-based channeling system which replaces hardwired multi-channel designations by software definitions of where a ‘channel’ lies in the spatial realm. It’s actually intended to allow *loads* of channels in a theater rather than just 5.1 or 7.1 and certainly, definitely, more than 2.1 (stereo). Yet, when you listen to Dolby Atmos via Airpods you are restricting yourself to just 2 physical channels (Left and Right). The illusion of spatial sound with Atmos on Airpods is created via psychoacoustics and digital processing to ‘enhance’ the illusion of 3D sound. No audio purist in her right mind is going to listen to this processed crap – it’s like lossy audio on steroids. If messing with lossless audio to throw away stuff that humans cannot hear is bad, how is messing with audio to make it sound more spatial suddenly good? To Audiophiles, ‘good’ means zero messing. By the way, Sonos also doesn’t support Apple’s Spatial Audio and there’s no published roadmap for it.

Spotify is currently almost twice the size of Apple Music with 32% market share vs 18%. They will shortly introduce a lossless tier, with pricing as yet unknown. No mention of Spatial. It will be interesting to see if Apple’s move helps them gain market share. The lossless side of it will likely only counter Spotify and not be of much benefit to the average Apple consumer – it’s more for the guys and gals with ‘real’ listening gear. The Spatial may play out as something that the Fanbois learn to like and help lure consumers away from Spotify. Time will tell.