Lossless on Apple Music

[AudioSceptic]

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere but I see that Apple Music has offered Lossless audio for a while now. <https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/music.htm>

Until now I've preferred to buy CDs, usually cheap from ebay, and rip them in Apple Lossless for streaming from our NAS and syncing to our iPhones. At £/$10.99 monthly I'm now tempted for the first time to sign up with a streaming service. Has anyone any experiences to share, in particular the hardware they use for Apple Music?

 

[JRowland]

Equipment requirements for me up until we recently got internet was my phone (and cellular service) and a usb/optical bridge (SMSL PO100 2024 at first but I wanted a display so switched to a Topping D10s) plus the cables, amp, speaker. After getting home internet my Denon 4800 has airplay2 and allows me to cut the cables. To me corded or uncorded sound the same but uncorded I have a volume limit I can’t seem to get rid of. It’s pretty loud (-5 ish with 0 being reference or 85 ish db) but sometimes I want more and need to plug in to the dac/bridge if I want it bad enough. I had a Yamaha receiver with airplay2 ability not being used so I hooked that up in my bedroom to cut cords and get better sound than Bluetooth. In my garage I have a very old Kenwood AVR, I just got a WIIM mini to be able to be cordless out there. I was using a dac dongle out there previously and it worked fine it was just corded.

The nicest thing about the Apple Music subscription for me has been the ability to try a lot of new to me music in a lot of genres, and more recently to play with multichannel mixes. I always used to hate hearing a few good songs from an album and then purchasing said album only to find I dislike most of it and those one or two songs are the exception. I still pay for the service but it’s less than one failure cd purchase and I can fail over and over without feeling remorse. When I find albums I like I still buy and rip the cd because I have a fear that my “ownership” rug could get pulled at any time but that’s my paranoia. When I find songs I like but not the album I just add them to a playlist, if those go away at some point so be it.

 

[masterhw]

I switched to Apple Music earlier this year after using Tidal and Spotify, never being totally satisfied with either. I think AM is the service I see myself sticking with for the next 10+ years. The only pain points are around the walled ecosystem, that being said they do have a competent Android app.

One of the biggest selling points personally for AM ended up being Apple Digital Masters whitepaper. It’s not a unique selling point that AM has lossless (now almost all its competitors do too) however I pretty strongly believe Apple Music consistently gets the best (or tied for best) version of a master. There is nothing preventing other services from getting a high quality master too, but Apple seems to be the only service to who it’s a priority. Even after Tidal which supports both I still found a meaningful portion of my library had Hi-Res or Atmos versions only on Apple Music.

Hardware wise, I stream from my phone, and Windows personal or Mac work laptops. App works fine on all of those, I don’t lose any sleep over not having exclusive mode sound output. For my home theatre right now I typically Airplay from my Windows laptop to Denon AVR, which bizarrely casts in lossless (my phone and mac laptop are 256k streams). Planning to get the new Apple TV to get Atmos mixes.

On DAPs and Streamers AM support can be a bit sporadic, as Apple doesn’t particularly have third party usable APIs. The streamers I’ve seen with AM support (Like the DMP-A6) are really just little Android environments running the Android app, which works perfectly fine actually. But it does raise the barrier to higher end implementations and not little embedded devices.

 

[SKBubba]

I tried it for a couple of weeks. I purchased an Apple TV 4k and an iPad to control it. It is lossless up to 48k on apple tv. Sounds great, lots of curated playlists, good recommendations. Mobile app worked great on my android. I thought about sticking with it, but being a windows and android user gives plenty of other options, so I returned the apple gear. If you are already in the apple system you might want to try the apple tv approach.

 

[Martini]

The nicest thing about the Apple Music subscription for me has been the ability to try a lot of new to me music in a lot of genres, and more recently to play with multichannel mixes. I always used to hate hearing a few good songs from an album and then purchasing said album only to find I dislike most of it and those one or two songs are the exception. I still pay for the service but it’s less than one failure cd purchase and I can fail over and over without feeling remorse. When I find albums I like I still buy and rip the cd because I have a fear that my “ownership” rug could get pulled at any time but that’s my paranoia. When I find songs I like but not the album I just add them to a playlist, if those go away at some point so be it.

This ^
It has allowed me to explore more music and then purchase the albums I found worthy/rewarding, usually through HDTracks, ProStudio or Presto. I also like the music channels for background when working or working out.