Apple lossless official announcement

[oryan_dunn]

Was out of the USA living on islands in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific (between 14 degrees S of the Equator & 15 degrees N of the Equator from 2001-2018. During that time I ran into the Laser Disk stuff at a Karaoke Club in Sasebo, Japan. The information that you have provided is new to me and I will check it out. Thank you.

Petr Harmy (with the help of others) did a frame by frame restoration. The Blu-ray versions are available, and he's currently working on 4k versions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy's_Despecialized_Edition

This work ended up getting him a job in Hollywood.
He has a Youtube channel and does livestreams of him working on it:
https://www.youtube.com/user/harmacek

 

[Gekel]

It appears on the whole that Apple's services have become more 'likeable'.

For me it is not pro Apple or pro Spotify, but against MQA. I hate it when a company claims to have THE answer to the highest quality audio, but you have to use their equipment and their data encoding routines. The whole high quality audio industry has to do this because customers want the feature available in the equipment. It would be the perfect cash cow for that company, which I could live with, if there wouldn't have been some unpleasant audio quality checks in the past weeks revealing that the claims about quality are not true and they also try to hide this fact by blocking anyone from running an objective analysis.

So in short: anything that stops MQA from becoming even more popular is a good thing.

 

[Jhify]

I really like Tidal and I dislike the Apple entrapment/ecosystem model. That doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the technical prowess of Apple; however, I will never be herded into their gilded cage. When you evaluate the arguments for Apple adherence, really, it isn't actually about technical advantage as much as it is about marketing and an over-selling of very minimal advantages, creating a perception of significant benefit. First and foremost, Apple is a marketing innovator, and a highly successful one to say the least.

There is ZERO chance that in level matched, blind listening tests that anything from Apple music will sound better. Tidal, as one example has fantastic user interfaces (or at least I think so). I found Apple music dreadful, and their mind numbing insistence on thinking for me was exhausting. Depending on ones taste, Tidal has a fabulous catalogue and Tidal has consistently tried to deliver a solid experience. Sure, MQA is a misstep, but many people have jumped aboard that (hopefully) sinking ship.

Tidal is still my streaming service of choice for the time being but few things bug me.
- They apperently now deliver lossy first fold MQA istead of redbook for the hifi quality (need to be checked but it's been tested)
- One of the main claims was to give a better share to the artists and they still haven't meet my expection on that part. If they give a better % per stream they only have 4M susbriber and they cost twice more monthly. And now that Jack Dorsey bought Jayz shares I doubt it's gonna get better overtime.

I feel like I'm gonna do the switch to apple music anytime soon if they really improve their offer as they intend to.

 

[Dj7675]

I always had a standard autoexec.bat and config.sys, just tweaked for the CDROM drivers, soundcards etc. Those were the days eh?

There was always the catch-22 of needing the CDROM driver to load the driver/files that were on the CD.

Favourite file management program back then was X-Tree Gold! Remember that?

View attachment 130798

XTree Gold... was amazing in its day.

 

[Gekel]

I always had a standard autoexec.bat and config.sys, just tweaked for the CDROM drivers, soundcards etc. Those were the days eh?

That's already pretty high tech stuff. When I started I played around with various settings with himem.sys to free up some additional bytes below the 640k memory line, and I also played a lot with different mouse drivers (at a later stage) to find one with the least memory requirements for win 3.0

My oldest memories with PC date back to MS DOS 5.0, with 5.25" and 3.5" drives and a single 40MB hard drive on a 386DX/40. No CDROM, that came later.

But the real old ones are Pong on the TV, Atari 2600, the Schneider CPC 464 and the C64. I still have my "full metal" C128D here in my room. It was the first computer I owned and I spent the whole holidays to earn money to buy it.

 

[norcalscott]

For me it is not pro Apple or pro Spotify, but against MQA. I hate it when a company claims to have THE answer to the highest quality audio, but you have to use their equipment and their data encoding routines. The whole high quality audio industry has to do this because customers want the feature available in the equipment. It would be the perfect cash cow for that company, which I could live with, if there wouldn't have been some unpleasant audio quality checks in the past weeks revealing that the claims about quality are not true and they also try to hide this fact by blocking anyone from running an objective analysis.

So in short: anything that stops MQA from becoming even more popular is a good thing.

It would not surprise me at all if Apple does not adopt MQA themselves, especially when they release the next versions of the Airpod's that will support the new lossless media so they can sell hardware again to all the existing users. If there were ever two proprietary-first marketing companies that are made for each other, it is surely MQA and Apple.

They are even hiring MQA specialists (not really, but this is pretty funny)

 

[dkinric]

I see no realistic universe in which Apple would adopt MQA. They could just fiddle with the signal, call it "Applesound" or something, and it would dwarf MQA in use and install base on day one. Apple has zero reason (short of intense consumer demand - unlikely) to share their streaming revenue with anyone.

 

[Somafunk]

I’ll state it now so I can be proven right/wrong - apple will not adopt mqa, there is absolutely zero upside for apple.

 

[abdo123]

It would not surprise me at all if Apple does not adopt MQA themselves, especially when they release the next versions of the Airpod's that will support the new lossless media so they can sell hardware again to all the existing users. If there were ever two proprietary-first marketing companies that are made for each other, it is surely MQA and Apple.

They are even hiring MQA specialists (not really, but this is pretty funny)

you obviously know nothing about Apple if you think they would ever adopt MQA.

they would never pay for anything to anyone unless it gives them an edge, they do not even adopt free stuff (FLAC), and have made their own redundant Apple lossless Audio codec (ALAC, which is the format of Apple music now).

they wouldn't be a trillion dollar company if they paid for snake oil.

 

[Zensō]

I’ll state it now so I can be proven right/wrong - apple will not adopt mqa, there is absolutely zero upside for apple.

There's actually no upside for anyone to adopt MQA (other than MQA Ltd. and the record labels), but that's for another discussion.

 

[blueone]

they wouldn't be a trillion dollar company if they paid for snake oil.

Almost unbelievably, as of the moment this is posted, $2.123T.

 

[norcalscott]

you obviously know nothing about Apple if you think they would ever adopt MQA.

they would never pay for anything to anyone unless it gives them an edge, they do not even adopt free stuff (FLAC), and have made their own redundant Apple lossless Audio codec (ALAC, which is the format of Apple music now).

they wouldn't be a trillion dollar company if they paid for snake oil.

They pay for Dolby, no? Dolby's licensing terms are well known for being quite expensive. In fact, Apple pays many millions in license fees of all kinds every year.

They also own Beats and is there no better example of snakeoilism?

I know there are many huge Apple fans here, that's great - I own Apple products myself, but if they perceive a marketing edge that gets people to purchase their iThings then they will be all over it.

Outside of tech forums like this and nerdfests live Reddit, there is very little understanding that MQA is anything other than "better sound" and that is what sells product. Beats is the case in point to that I am afraid.

 

[dkinric]

Apple is #11 in the WORLD in revenue ($274b) and #3 in profits ($55b)

 

[Somafunk]

They also own Beats and is there no better example of snakeoilism?

I imagine I could list 1001+ examples of snakeoilism that are of n+1 magnitude greater than beats.
Compared to the headphones I was using with my dc2 Walkman in the late 80’s I would have chewed my left arm off to get something as good sounding as beats, beats introduced a vast amount of users to the idea of paying extra for headphones, this is ultimately a good thing and not to be confused with headphone elitism

 

[abdo123]

They pay for Dolby, no?

Apple waits 5 to 10 years after a new technology hits, if it becomes mainstream they adopt it.

for example, their latest phones still don't have 120Hz refresh rate screens, which is almost scandalous in 2021.

Atmos (object oriented audio) is amazing and looks like it's here to stay, so they're taking the risk of adopting it.

They also own Beats and is there no better example of snakeoilism?

more like they purchased beats and ruined it, it doesn't exist anymore.

 

[_thelaughingman]

Apple waits 5 to 10 years after a new technology hits, if it becomes mainstream they adopt it.

for example, their latest phones still don't have 120Hz refresh rate screens, which is almost scandalous in 2021.

The battery life and thermal efficiency governs everything in Apple's mobile design philosophy, it the energy draw is significant to hinder performance than Apple will not implement it until it's refined to meet their threshold. This was the case with many features that first came out on Android phones prior to Apple incorporating them.

 

[Frank Dernie]

their latest phones still don't have 120Hz refresh rate screens

What is the benefit of this? Given the choice of 30 or 60 Hz refresh videos I can't see any difference (other than file size) why would I need more?
Serious question, though I am never going to use a phone to watch anything.

 

[abdo123]

The battery life and thermal efficiency governs everything in Apple's mobile design philosophy, it the energy draw is significant to hinder performance than Apple will not implement it until it's refined to meet their threshold. This was the case with many features that first came out on Android phones prior to Apple incorporating them.

the battery life performance of their 5G receivers is very mediocre, I really think it's a matter of 'how much we need it' and 'can we make a replacement on our own'. thermal and power efficiencies come a little later on the list.

 

[abdo123]

What is the benefit of this? Given the choice of 30 or 60 Hz refresh videos I can't see any difference (other than file size) why would I need more?
Serious question, though I am never going to use a phone to watch anything.

are you for real? or is this trolling?

I'm serious, the jump between 30Hz and 60Hz is mindblowing, 60Hz to 120Hz a little less but still smoother nonetheless.

 

[Frank Dernie]

are you for real? or is this trolling?

I'm serious, the jump between 30Hz and 60Hz is mindblowing, 60Hz to 120Hz a little less but still smoother nonetheless.

Real question.
I am not into video.
The difference isn't enough for me to bother about on the odd video I have watched, to me.
I am talking about a 27" computer monitor though