Apple Rumored To Be Developing High-Resolution Audio Formats

To clarify: I don't rip the mp3's into FLAC, that would be stupid. I also have a ton of cd's, those go to FLAC. :)
 
Revdarian said:
I'm amazed about the ammount of people with golden ears that think that 320 Kbps mp3's aren't good enough even "in a quiet room"... i wonder why they haven't gone and taken the listening challenge since if they can make those claims then noticing that the cabling isn't audiophile grade must be soooooooooo simple!, come on guys, i know i know, the prize is only 1m USD$ which must be beneath you, but don't shy away, just show up everyone in the world how golden are your ears!

http://gizmodo.com/305549/james-ran...iles-can-prove-7250-speaker-cables-are-better


PS at 34 years i do still have a range that 19 years would envy, above 19 KHz with my crappy speakers even, and claim BS on those "purity" claims.
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I hang out on the high end audio forums for hand built headphone amplifiers. There are people on that site that "cant stand" to listen to their amps till they have warmed up for at least 1 hour because they are so harsh...
 
westrock2000 said:
There are like 6 or 7 posts in here about how Apple just wants to lock you into their hardware. :confused:

And yes, I was the first one to say it's not true.
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Yes, on the first page. We get you. Don't let the idiots ruin the fun.

BIG DRAMATIC TEXT!
 
nightanole said:
I hang out on the high end audio forums for hand built headphone amplifiers. There are people on that site that "cant stand" to listen to their amps till they have warmed up for at least 1 hour because they are so harsh...
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I hope they are using cable elevators....systems sound like shit without them.

cable%20elevators%20IMG_3259%20242pix.jpg
 
Tiberian said:
The whole "high resolution" thing is a fad (not to mention it has a strong placebo effect on most folks) and it'll blow over. Look at the Pono Player that Neil Young is still backing at a massive loss: nobody cares about it and especially not at the ridiculous price they ask ($300) for like $20-30 worth of actual hardware. The whole idea is wasteful from start to finish anyway - I don't care if I had a damned petabyte of storage with redundancy and free power and replacements for life, I still wouldn't waste time collecting/purchasing anything past 16 bit 48 kHz files because our ears really do have limitations.
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So, wait, you think the failure of the Pono Player isn't the fact that people are no longer willing to carry single-task devices because their phone plays music just fine, but that people don't care about quality?

[H] front page news comment threads: where brains go to die. (This applies to the ridiculous loaded headlines in this forum, too.)
 
DeFex said:
and then you play it on apple beats headphones? may as well stick with mp3
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No, I'd be inclined to say this would be the reason Apple has been in talks with Audeze. Wouldn't be surprised to either see Apple straight buyout Audeze, and/or have Audeze as their "Pro" line of headphone products and keep Beats for entry level headphones.
 
collegeboy69us said:
It would please the most people and be most economical if they started using FLAC. So obviously that wont' be happening.


I'm just waiting for the time when you are using your the nice high def apple format... you will be required to have your "authorized" beats headphones plugged in, otherwise it won't play either.
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I agree FLAC would be better (if for no other reason than it might lead to more devices supporting FLAC), but ALAC is lossless and Apple doesn't use DRM, so by definition it's not locked to anything (never mind that ALAC files are played by players on other platforms.
 
nightanole said:
I hang out on the high end audio forums for hand built headphone amplifiers. There are people on that site that "cant stand" to listen to their amps till they have warmed up for at least 1 hour because they are so harsh...
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I wonder if they could tell that in a double blind test (assuming you could get 2 amps that sound the same).
 
Terpfen said:
So, wait, you think the failure of the Pono Player isn't the fact that people are no longer willing to carry single-task devices because their phone plays music just fine, but that people don't care about quality?

[H] front page news comment threads: where brains go to die. (This applies to the ridiculous loaded headlines in this forum, too.)
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Nah, it failed because it provides no meaningful advantage over a cheaper device or your phone. It looks like a Toblerone and it's alleged technological advantage is nothing but snake oil

10 years ago, I would have bought one, because I bought into it, but at this point, we know that the only possible advantage is if they get an exclusive remastered album.

For the record, if my Rio Karma wasn't in so-so condition, I'd still use it for music.
 
But if they improve audio quality, wont that increase file size? Oh dear, such flagrant consumption of resource!
 
jbltecnicspro said:
Technically, SACD brought benefits. Sony and Phillips defined the mastering requirement that peaks not peak above -6dB I believe. This leads to far less clipping, and far better masters.

I mean... It's all a bunch of fucking shit though. If they'd just properly master CD audio in the first damn place, we'd be good.
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So much this. I recently purchased the new Lamb of God album on CD, the first CD from a major record label I've purchased in a long time, and I'm so disgusted by the audio quality that I still have yet to listen to the whole thing. I've been spoiled too long by albums from small labels and self-published bands who don't care about radio play.
 
None of this matters. Apple/iTunes has been one of the biggest culprits in the loudness wars and the push for lousy music masterings that prioritize earbud quality over actual fidelity.

See: Steely Dan's Aja. Recorded and mastered on tape in 1977, re-released on "lousy" old CD. Regarded as one of (maybe the) best-sounding albums of all time.

We don't need 192kHz/24Bit audio format support for new devices to sound good, we need engineers who know what they are doing.
 
Stevoman said:
None of this matters. Apple/iTunes has been one of the biggest culprits in the loudness wars and the push for lousy music masterings that prioritize earbud quality over actual fidelity.
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Apple does not remaster albums. They post what the record labels provide.
 
There was a double blind study some time back and actually put a lot of these "golden eared" audiophiles to the test and compared high bit 24bit/96Khz recording to the old CD standard 16bit/24Khz.

They found MOST couldn't tell the difference which was which.
Point is the 16bit standard for CD wasn't chosen at random. Above this; higher encoding has diminished returns.
 
Terpfen said:
Apple does not remaster albums. They post what the record labels provide.
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Apple does have their "Mastered for iTunes" program and guidelines which has been gaining acceptance, and which arguably (of coarse on forums) has been a positive step forward in leveling out sound quality.
 
Stevoman said:
None of this matters. Apple/iTunes has been one of the biggest culprits in the loudness wars and the push for lousy music masterings that prioritize earbud quality over actual fidelity.
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blame it on artists, labels and consumers, not Apple. They're a glorified record store. And FWIW, I distinctly recall Foo Fighters' "There is nothing left to lose" having hyper compression and it came out in 1999. If you have old CDs, you can seen a steady trend toward more compression.
 
So yet another proprietary audio format that only works with lightning headphones! Great...
 
Armenius said:
So much this. I recently purchased the new Lamb of God album on CD, the first CD from a major record label I've purchased in a long time, and I'm so disgusted by the audio quality that I still have yet to listen to the whole thing. I've been spoiled too long by albums from small labels and self-published bands who don't care about radio play.
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You could have checked here before wasting your money:

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Lamb of God

Just use that as a guide. And feel free to contribute tracks you have :D
 
Terpfen said:
Apple does not remaster albums. They post what the record labels provide.
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Apple exerted enormous pressure on labels/artists in the early days of iTunes/iPods to master material so that it would sound "good" on cheap earbuds at lower compression rates.

They have since been trying to reverse that trend, but the damage is already done. An entire generation of music was engineered to be trash, and no amount of high-resolution re-releasing will fix it.
 
Revdarian said:
I'm amazed about the amount of people with golden ears that think that 320 Kbps mp3's aren't good enough even "in a quiet room"... i wonder why they haven't gone and taken the listening challenge
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Because these are the same people who buy 200 mph cars and wrap themselves around trees. There's a huge market of high priced stuff that people will buy because they think other people will be impressed by them. Speakers are a perfect example. Good old Henry Kloss (creator of the hi fidelity cassette deck, the first electrostatic loudspeakers, co inventor of Dolby sound reduction, founder of Acoustic Research, Advent, KLH, Cambridge, Tivoli), was interviewed about 25 years ago; he told a tale about back when he was creating a new speaker. After spending months working on this wonderful new speaker, they did a little experiment; they took a pair of Radio Shack Realistic speakers, and hooked them up to the same hi-fi but with a 10 band equalizer. And, lo and behold, they could make the cheap Realistic speakers sound just as good as the lofty priced Advent ones. Yet here we are, 2015, and people still insist they can hear nicer sounds if they pay thousands of dollars more for speakers. If you want to read about that, it was in a copy of Stereophile magazine back in the nineties.
What's even funnier, is that most people who claim they can hear the difference between 128 bit mp3's and CD's are listening to nice, loud rock, rap, techno, stuff which doesn't exactly lend itself to needing high quality recordings.
Which is fine. If people like to pretend that they can hear, see, smell, whatever, better than me, great. As long as they offer me free drinks and food, invite me to their expensive house with a pool, I'll go along with the farce and tell them what they want to hear. But I have yet to meet anyone who can hear the difference between 128 bit mp3's and CD quality when they're routinely listening to Jimmy Page and crew (or metallica, etc.), blasting out music so loud that you have to shout to hear each other from three feet away.
Apple doesn't give a crap about making better sound quality. They ship crap earbuds with their devices. What they want is a proprietary format in order to control what you listen to and on what you use, so they can sell more music. That's it. And they'll tell you whatever they need to in order to do it. Because enough people have big egos and are willing to pay to feed them.
 
Stevoman said:
Apple exerted enormous pressure on labels/artists in the early days of iTunes/iPods to master material so that it would sound "good" on cheap earbuds at lower compression rates.

They have since been trying to reverse that trend, but the damage is already done. An entire generation of music was engineered to be trash, and no amount of high-resolution re-releasing will fix it.
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Actually Mastered for Itunes requirements were dynamic range, minimal to no clipping and 24/96 masters. The industry argument was if it would make a noticeable difference, not that they were trying to make it sound better on cheap earphones.

https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/docs/mastered_for_itunes.pdf
 
Stevoman said:
Apple exerted enormous pressure on labels/artists in the early days of iTunes/iPods to master material so that it would sound "good" on cheap earbuds at lower compression rates.
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They didn't exert pressure to make the songs louder. The loudness war existed well before Apple bought SoundJam MP.
 
nightfly said:
What's even funnier, is that most people who claim they can hear the difference between 128 bit mp3's and CD's are listening to nice, loud rock, rap, techno, stuff which doesn't exactly lend itself to needing high quality recordings.
Which is fine. If people like to pretend that they can hear, see, smell, whatever, better than me, great.
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I don't have golden ears, but I just did a test on NPR and I picked the lossless version every time. It's not always obvious and you have to know what to listen to. MP3 often changes the sound of an S sound and symbols. for MP3, 128 kbps is the absolute minimum before the sound turns to mush. Vorbis is the king of low bit rate compression and AAC is pretty good, as I recall.

If you have all your hearing, you should be able to hear a difference between 128kbps and 320, since the latter reproduces audio up to 19.5khz vs 16khz for 128kbps.
 
nilepez said:
I don't have golden ears, but I just did a test on NPR and I picked the lossless version every time. It's not always obvious and you have to know what to listen to.
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But if you're not sitting there listening for specific 's' sounds, just rocking along with the music, you're not going to notice any difference at all. And that encompasses 99.999% of listening. Especially if your listening is enhanced by, oh, a nice cold beer or such.
If you have all your hearing, you should be able to hear a difference between 128kbps and 320, since the latter reproduces audio up to 19.5khz vs 16khz for 128kbps.
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You're talking about mosquito ringtone range now, not music. Besides, most people can't hear above 16khz anyway (virtually no one above the age of 30 or so). Those who can, are usually under say, 25, and are thrilled by listening to long uninterrupted FM radio broadcasts of their favorite songs, and FM type quality is what, 10 khz? What current recorded popular music has instruments playing above 16 khz? Anything we'd know? Any singers get that high in regular songs, not just when striving for screeching high notes for the hell of it? I mean, come on, listen to the high range stuff ( if you can actually hear it): http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/
 
Kalabalana said:
Apple needs their own compression method so they can restrict their hardware to it, and make boatloads more money off of their consumer base, which is less than able to realize such a marketing stunt when it hits them in the wallet.
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Yes that's why Apple is offering mp3's now on iTunes. :rolleyes:
 
nightfly said:
But if you're not sitting there listening for specific 's' sounds, just rocking along with the music, you're not going to notice any difference at all. And that encompasses 99.999% of listening. Especially if your listening is enhanced by, oh, a nice cold beer or such.

You're talking about mosquito ringtone range now, not music. Besides, most people can't hear above 16khz anyway (virtually no one above the age of 30 or so). Those who can, are usually under say, 25, and are thrilled by listening to long uninterrupted FM radio broadcasts of their favorite songs, and FM type quality is what, 10 khz? What current recorded popular music has instruments playing above 16 khz? Anything we'd know? Any singers get that high in regular songs, not just when striving for screeching high notes for the hell of it? I mean, come on, listen to the high range stuff ( if you can actually hear it): http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/
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I have tinitus and I can hear 17.4khz (and I'm way WAY beyond 30).

Regardless, you said the differences can't be heard on rock music and they can. There are lots of acceptable format, including cassettes, but that doesn't mean that CD isn't a step up. The same is true for CD Audio vs a 128kbps MP3 (or a 320kbps vs 128kbps).

That's not the case with consumer 24/96 recordings. At best it does nothing and more than likely introduces distortion.
 
B00nie said:
More like yet another hater who doesn't even bother to check facts.
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My iPhone and iPad would disagree with you. If you haven't noticed, the "switch to digital" has resulted in protected content encryption and DRM schemes being deployed across the board. It's in Apple's best interest to do the same to persuade record companies to use the iTunes store as a "secure" solution that prevents most methods of pirating.

They have the infrastructure to deploy DRM and with lightning only audio output: they have a hardware solution that offers HDCP type security all way to your ears. Pay attention to what is happening. What Apple does here could literally DELETE the word "analog" from the dictionary.
 
hardware_failure said:
They are probably just researching ways to inject stronger DRM.
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This is exactly what they're doing. You have to be pretty slow to miss what's happening when Apple announces of a new audio format immediately after their announcement of a "digital only" lightning output.
 
bomni said:
My iPhone and iPad would disagree with you. If you haven't noticed, the "switch to digital" has resulted in protected content encryption and DRM schemes being deployed across the board. It's in Apple's best interest to do the same to persuade record companies to use the iTunes store as a "secure" solution that prevents most methods of pirating.

They have the infrastructure to deploy DRM and with lightning only audio output: they have a hardware solution that offers HDCP type security all way to your ears. Pay attention to what is happening. What Apple does here could literally DELETE the word "analog" from the dictionary.
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Songs purchased from iTunes have no DRM. They did in the beginning, but it's been years since Apple removed that across the board.

Apple were the ones primarily responsible for DROPPING DRM on digitally purchased music.

Even high-resolution files, rather limited though the section currently is, are available from multiple vendors in completely DRM-free formats.

The DRM-on-purchased-music cat is most definitely out of the bag. The horse has bolted. The genie is out of the lamp. You're not going backwards from here.

And unless they come up with a direct brain interface, there is always going to be analog output. That you might choose to feed a digital signal to your headphones directly, instead of an outboard DAC/Amp, is just a convenient and a way to get around the fact that most people with nice headphones seem to try and drive them straight from the puny on-board outputs on the phone and never get close to hearing them working properly.

Apple don't need to do anything here ... they already have a widely supported high-resolution format that supports optional DRM. It's called ALAC, it's been open-sourced, and it's widely supported.
 
RandemTox said:
Apple don't need to do anything here ... they already have a widely supported high-resolution format that supports optional DRM. It's called ALAC, it's been open-sourced, and it's widely supported.
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They don't need to do anything here but they are...which is why everyone is suspicious. Apple has a very bad track record of implementing proprietary everything/walled garden/vendor lock-in to screw over consumers.
 
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