They're mastered such that it's specifically defined what is lost and what isn't in the compression process (rather than automatic) so they’ll sound closer to the original master, but not quite the same. I don't know enough or have the equipment, really, to speak to how it sounds compared to CD/vinyl.
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Apple Music Launches 'Digital Masters' Initiative Out of Old 'Mastered for iTunes' Program
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Some albums are only available for purchase on iTunes, but are on streaming in competing platforms. I can't imagine a scenario where it makes sense to allow Spotify and Amazon to stream your music but not Apple. I hope this gets addressed eventually after this program.
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Tidal exists. No need to wait.
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Tidal exists. No need to wait.
I think it has to do with how it's mastered from the originals. Just like there are different masters for Vinyl because of low end EQ could just cause the needle to skip.. Digital Masters are different now than they were when CDs were initially made.. They can get the EQ a little better. Still not totally Lossless-style, but still a little better than ripping a CD or maybe even what was already made available in iTunes. This is a good thing for sure, but not sure it needs a whole article dedicated to it.. Maybe just a new playlist or something so people can be exposed to some albums they might not have known about?
Enable "Sound Check" on Settings > Music. Sometimes, it comes down to how the album or song was mixed and mastered. Compare Nirvana's Nevermind and In Utero for example. The former is always significantly louder.
First... you have to be born at a time where all those analog songs were made and broadcast (such as the sixties or seventies). Second, you have to have a good enough memory about those very same songs that were sold on 45 rpm records (or albums) and can know/recall the exact pitch they played back at the time. Third, you have to be convinced and passionate enough to say... *something funny* is going on here... and mean it, despite any possible nay-saying to the contrary.
Try the Beatles collection of tunes and songs as an example. I know that every time I hear an old Beatles song on the oldies-radio or stream.... I hear it played back at a higher (around 3%) pitch in tune. Not played faster... mind you... but simply higher in pitch by around one Note. Nothing else about the song is different.
Others besides myself can hear the difference, as well.. so I know this isn't some physiological phenomenon or just general aging. It happens, it is not in question here. Radio Stations even admit they speed up all the old rock songs to get more commercial time in per hour, but that doesn't explain why or how the total-running time of the songs remain the same.
It just happens... and this has been going on for a couple of decades. It is why my Forum name is... what it is.
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That IS what the Soundcheck option is for, you should try it out if you find constantly changing volume levels annoying.
Proper mastering makes a far bigger difference than the minute (and probably imperceptible) differences between 256kbps AAC and lossless encoding. One of the biggest benefits of the "Mastered for iTunes" program in my book is that the songs usually use less dynamic range compression, which prevents distortions and other problems (google "loudness wars" if you want to know more). That often makes them sound better than the corresponding CDs.
I don't know about you but I listen to the vast majority of my music from CarPlay. That's a digital connection and my headhunt will handle FLAC, etc.
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This is definitely true. Nothing drives me more crazy than an older song that hasn't been remastered for modern systems, they just sound flat; lossless isn't going to fix that.
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Just adding to the consensus here: “Mastered for iTunes” was only ever marketing and I suspect “Apple Digital Masters” is the same. “Allowing engineers to optimize music for the digital download format by encoding from high-resolution masters” is what studios or Apple should have been doing anyway; anything less is incompetent trash. They also (conveniently) make no mention of the resolution or bit-rate ultimately served to customers.
Tidal is now offering genuine masters, with high-resolution lossless streaming in its Hi-Fi tier. I’ve seen a number of albums pop up as 88.2 kHz on my DAC recently with the “Master” badge: classic Gorillaz albums for instance.
Tidal is now offering genuine masters, with high-resolution lossless streaming in its Hi-Fi tier. I’ve seen a number of albums pop up as 88.2 kHz on my DAC recently with the “Master” badge: classic Gorillaz albums for instance.
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Some info that I got is Apple is working on it (lossless high-fidelity streaming like Tidal) but they're approaching it by developing next-generation codec / compression technology first before rolling out the service.
No, it wasn´t.
Better mastering is more important (that is, easily appreciated by our ears) in perceived audio quality , than lossless, specially when we´re dealing with high quality lossy encodings with bitrates well beyond the transparency level.
Lossless wont fix ****** mastering, but guidelines with better practices for engineers and extremely easy to use tools to avoid clipping and distortion and preserve dynamic range will.
That´s what Apple has been doing since 2012 with their mastered for Itunes initiative. As a result, many albums sounds better in Apple Music than Spotify, Google Music, or Tidal. Dynamic range matters.
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THIS. A thousand times this.
[doublepost=1565196842][/doublepost]As for this...
I THINK that this is merely a view of all the mastered for Itunes releases in one organised section in Apple Music, or at least that´s what I can gather from the article. But... whatever this is, is not live yet. I cant find any mention to it in Apple Music UI, or the Itunes Store. So, we don´t know yet what this is exactly, nor how to look for it. Correct?
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Cool! But I guess it won´t be live soon, since current Airpods only support AAC.
Interesting argument. What is this based on , any link? would like to read up on this.
Great to hear you on MacRumors again Mr Rigby!
And, coming from a studio background, your comment is 100% correct!!! Bravo!
Around 4 months ago I did a face off of Tidal and Apple Music. I got the idea after watching a YouTube video where a guy breaks down the quality of every steaming service. He did it by listening and looking at the actual streams/output.
The speakers were GoldenEars but I also did it on some cheaper KEF speakers.
What usually happens is the better the speakers, the more flaws that are heard.
On the same material Apple Music was harsh and for me hard to enjoy. Imaging was flat with little sound stage.
Using Tidal HD the soundstage was levels ahead of Apple Music. I heard details in recordings that were completely missing with Apple. Can’t begin to explain the difference.
I hear the same compression arguments about video steaming. Yet I can see with my eyes the differences that compression makes depending on the scheme bandwidth.
Back to the music, last thing I did was high resolution music off BluRay. Alan Parsons is doing this now. That was truly amazing.
I’m an older audio guy and I know most people have grown up on compressed music. As with anything, if you are happy with it, then it is fine. Who am I to tell someone how they have to listen to music.
The speakers were GoldenEars but I also did it on some cheaper KEF speakers.
What usually happens is the better the speakers, the more flaws that are heard.
On the same material Apple Music was harsh and for me hard to enjoy. Imaging was flat with little sound stage.
Using Tidal HD the soundstage was levels ahead of Apple Music. I heard details in recordings that were completely missing with Apple. Can’t begin to explain the difference.
I hear the same compression arguments about video steaming. Yet I can see with my eyes the differences that compression makes depending on the scheme bandwidth.
Back to the music, last thing I did was high resolution music off BluRay. Alan Parsons is doing this now. That was truly amazing.
I’m an older audio guy and I know most people have grown up on compressed music. As with anything, if you are happy with it, then it is fine. Who am I to tell someone how they have to listen to music.
I have an Audi Q5 with the Bang Olfsen. I usually just stream bluetooth from my iphone or plugin for car play and stream apple music. It sounds pretty good, until...
There is a 10GB hard drive and it allows lossless rips of cd's. So I dusted off some cd's and the sound quality is way better. More and tighter bass was the biggest thing I noticed, but the highs had more sparkle.
Anyways, lossless is way better IMHO.
I have to disagree. One of my friends has a well setup room with B&W 802, balanced monoblock amps, and balanced DACs. We've double blind tested lossless vs lossy formats on this setup with ourselves and others many times, and the lossless tracks are obvious, every single time.
Does it make a difference on AirPods, or your average home theater - very unlikely, but the difference is clear as day on actual high end hardware.
How is Tidal HD getting from your watch to your ears? (Answer AA
How is the watch delivering the music to your headphones? If the answer is bluetooth, your $20 a month Tidal HD stream is getting converted to a 256bitrate AAC codec in the process.
Right but you're not comparing like with like. You've changed the interconnect from bluetooth, a low power rather cheap noisy radio connection, to a likely superior hard wired connection. Additionally the CD's could be mastered differently from the AACs/MP3s you're playing from your phone, or just not in a way that suits them, that can make a huge difference. Finally you *know* which is which, that can adversely affect your perception too.
In order to compare them properly you need to blind A/B test them and keep everything else the same.
Ah, careful there. Your car Bluetooth could be transcoding on the fly the AAC Apple Music stream to SBC Bluetooth default codec, which is terrible, and severely deteriorates audio quality. Transcoding lossy to lossy is dreadful, absolutely awful.
IOS support passtrough (ie, untouched) AAC streaming over Bluetooth , but that only possible if the hardware supports it. Most of cars systems won´t.
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Or worse, converted to a ****** bitrate SBC stream, if you headphones/bluetooth speakers doesn´t support AAC over bluetooth.
tidal is really not good. i use it for work sometimes and it's missing a lot from its catalog. as well as a lot of songs dont have "master" version but instead use a hi-fi bit rate which isn't so bad but its strange
waiting for apple to do this
Yeah, but can you hear them with your ears?
Seriously, unless you did a blind test (i.e. you don't know what version you're listening to) and made sure that both versions were encoded from the same master, subjective testing is pretty much meaningless.
That is incorrect. Consumer Reports tested lossy vs. lossless on high-end equipment and the difference was noticeable. I do agree that mastering is important.
Most car bluetooth systems use SBC Codecs which is a difference way to compress audio data than the AAC source data on an iPhone. The hardwired (Lightning to USB (carplay)) method will transmit the audio based on the source quality from your phone -and assuming the source is AAC files from Apple Music, the main reason it sounds so much better is not because bluetooth is "noisy radio connection", it's because the audio is being compressed a second time using the SBC bluetooth codec in the car.
As an analogy, imagine you speak English, AAC translates to Spanish, and if hardwired, your car stereo translates it back to English, not great, but the will likely have the same meaning. Now take your original source, translate to Spanish (AAC) now translate that to German (SBC) and have your car stereo translate back to English - nowhere near as good a translation.
One of the things that's great about Apple/AAC is that the same method to compress audio is used throughout the ecosystem so that an AAC file streamed from Apple Music servers to your iPhone through bluetooth to an AAC supporting headphone doesn't experience further degradation at each point along the way. The Mastered for iTunes program (myself and one or two others linked to the pdf outlining the process) does make the process of converting original source material to AAC less harmful to the original recording, but nevertheless, still a lossy format.
Also, back in the day, what we are calling lossless (CD quality 44/16) was bashed when it came out by audiophiles for a myraid of reasons - some more rational than others- but even CD quality is still 'lossy'.. just a question of where you want to stop.
I’d completely forgotten Bluetooth did that, thanks. And yeah I remember CD quality getting bashed by audiophiles back in the day too.