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Rumor: Apple to Announce Third-Generation AirPods and HiFi Apple Music Tier on May 18
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256 is not cd quality
quietly mixed high hat parts will almost disappear in aac if the song hasn’t been mastered for it
the fact that you don’t hear a difference says more about home pods than it does 1,411 wav vs 256 aac
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And I don't mean it is lossless, as stated very clear in my previous post. I'm just saying the Apple claim holds true for me that it is CD quality for my ears.
The word quality can be subjective. Apple never claim AAC is lossless.
No I know my speakers. My friend has a listening room with $20,000 speakers. I know how some albums sound. HomePods paired as stereo is quite good. (the big one not a mini)
Apple and "Free" in the same sentence, nope. It's another revenue stream.
Apple can compete when they need to. Look at how quickly iPods dropped in price when the Zune entered the market for example. Music streaming is a hot market so they want to attract as many users as they can, that may mean making the HiFi tier "free" - it's not like it costs them that much more to stream the files to you. They have plenty of bandwidth and storage.
aptx is a competing standard, and Apple doesn’t own it. If Apple use it, they will enrich the competitors and will be forced to pay royalties.
Route Incompatible" and "Route Unknown Compatibility" suggests that much like how Spatial Audio is limited to only the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max, HiFi Apple Music streaming could be exclusive to certain generation AirPods and other compatible devices. I’ll wait until there is testing to show real world experience not just antidotal golden ear ones. On the other hand, I’m the type of listener that listens to the music, not my equipment.
“hi-if” apple music means whatever apple says it means
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Random thought - what if it’s not hifi sound but instead, some sort of 3D spatial audio that takes advantage of existing hardware in your iOS devices and AirPods Pro / Max?
For example, imagine listening to classical music and being able to hear where each instrument is coming from, as though you were actually sitting in the room itself.
The music wouldn’t necessarily be higher quality, but would still make for a better listening experience in its own way. It would be a cool way for Apple to further leverage their hardware / software integration in a way that competitors can’t.
Now thankfully the static and buzzing issues seem to have went away. But I’ve always had issues with them charging, even with the AirPods and case clean as a whistle. Just this morning I woke up with my right one at 0% battery. This has happened with multiple replacements. I blame poor design, as this has never happened with my gen 1 or gen 2 regular AirPods.
you’re basically describing stereo sound and reverb. this is how music has been recorded and reproduced for decades
to the point that you are retyping almost verbatim stereo hi-fi ad copy from the 60s
if you mean to describe some sort of new fantastical thing then either music would have to be specifically recorded for it, or it would be some sort algorithmic on the fly altering of existing recorded music, which would not be accurately reproducing the recording
the best way to reproduce music is to as faithfully as possible playback the recording as the musicians, engineers, mixers and mastering engineers produced it and intended it to sound without any artificial coloration. using software trickery to try to compensate for lossy compression is one thing. trying to add something artificial that was never there does a disservice to the art of music altogether
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As long as you don't depend on algos to discover new music, get new playlists etc. Apple Music is the worst of breed when it comes to this.
So just to be clear - NO mention of expectations of AirPod PROS with this announcement, right? I've been waiting for awhile to pull the trigger on a new set of AirPods (but planning for the Pros), since I'm going from version1 AirPods and their battery life is about 20 minutes haha. I thought that AirPod Pros would've been included in this mix of updates but I guess not? Maybe go ahead and pull the trigger on the Pros the next time a good deal rolls around...
Hopefully AirPods max will support hifi audio transmission and we won’t have to upgrade to AirPods max pro
Not gonna happen imho. Pretty sure Apple will unveil their own high quality codec which will be activated with a FW upgrade on the Max and the Pro and will be included in the new AirPods 3
Hopefully this is true. I’ve been wanting to buy the Pros for a while but have been holding off in the hopes of an upgrade this year.
I understand the wireless angle, but not everybody uses apple music in wireless mode.
On the desktop there are quite a few people using wired headphones still.
I use Apple Music 70% on desktop 30% on mobile and in this smart working post-covid world I don't see this changing.
Also I don't think that apple would like its platform to be less feature rich than the competition.
Amazon Music and Spotify hi-fi have both a hi-fi tier accessible to everyone with a dac/wired headphones...locking the hi-fi tier to apple devices would be pretty grim.
Yeah, but my iPod Classic can’t be tracked, is free…forever, and will still be playing music long after civilisation collapses. Top that, Captain Competitive.
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