Can’t wait to hear all the people claiming to hear “brighter highs” and “richer mids” while listening to hi-def audio on their earbuds. 😂
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Spotify Rumored to Launch HiFi Audio as Part of New Top-Tier 'Supremium' Subscription Plan
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*laughs in audiophile*
Lossless audio is beneficial to a very few with the right equipment. For the rest it’s just marketing and a way to upsell.
I wonder... if they offer lossless then how come one can differ from another. They should offer virtually the same bits of audio, so any difference in sound should be due to equalizer settings at best?
If Supremium (more like CREAMiulum) pays out better to artists in addition to better audio quality, and it’s $15 or less, I’ll jump ship immediately. Apple Music’s interface is still utter crap and iOS 17 doesn’t look to fix any of that. I can’t believe that in 2023 if I ask Siri to play a song, it’ll continue on repeat instead of generating a station like Spotify. Just embarrassing.
Been waiting for this for years. Spotify crushes apple music is everything except audio quality. Woahh happy.
Stacked eh? Well, if we're building vertically it's time to move from national parks to skyscrapers - so I propose Empire State as the first chip to be named as such. We can then move to Sears. To CN. And so on.
I have to agree. I have 6 months free Apple Music with my Airpods Pro 2 but I keep going back to Spotify.
Also, why are people hammering Spotify for being late to the hi-fidelity / lossless music streaming compared to Apple Music? Apple is always late with newer techs with their phones and laptops compared to other manufacturers but nobody here seems to complain much.
How is lossy audio beneficial, and to who? Fraunhofer stockholders?
Don’t forget, lossless was the standard/only option 40 years ago. You were later “sold” on the downgrade that is lossy compression. Now THAT was marketing. The Stockholm Syndrome must be real bad for so many people to be desperately clinging onto inferior 90’s technology for dear life that they feel the need to knock the idea that something happens to be better than what they’re accustomed to.
True, and while it’s possible that different apps can have different forms of DSP in effect, Tidal in particular has had a bit of a wild rollercoaster ride in terms of their offerings. They started out as the ONLY service offering lossless. Then they partnered with the fake “hi-res” that was MQA and ended up with inferior files to everyone else who had since started offering actual lossless/hi-res.
They’re only now just reverting that change and offering true lossless again. So in theory, Tidal SHOULD have content parity with the other (true) lossless services… but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if a lot of the files they are serving up are still borked/degraded versions based on when they were screwing around with MQA.
I don’t think Apple has ever been this egregiously late to the party compared to competing brands… not with most things, at least.
In terms of audio though, it’s a major thorn in my side that Apple still will not support FLAC on the iPhone. They deliberately block people from adding their own locally stored lossless audio files to their own on-device music library, which is pretty blatant anticonsumer behavior as far as I’m concerned.
I complain about this constantly, as it should NOT be a problem in this day and age. It’s something Apple should have fixed long before they were offering streaming music at any level; and it’s a problem that no other hardware or software manufacturer has in this day and age either. Pretty much my only real gripe with iOS. That; and no rotate button in the native iOS video player.
Lossy is only beneficial in its ability to conserve space and bandwidth. How relevant that is today is debatable with high speed internet and devices with large storage capacities. It meant more in the days of the 2 GB iPod. Data caps for those streaming with cellular data might be an argument in favor of lossy. In either case, my point wasn’t that lossy is good, but that paying more for lossless if you don’t have equipment that can make the difference discernible is fairly pointless. I would rather see lossless be the default though.
Re. Tidal I have heard some of their “hifi” tracks that contained distortion that was not present on the same tracks on Qobuz (sounding more like a bad compression on supposedly lossless music), but I will remain skeptical of the claim that different streaming services’ CD-quality tracks differ in tone.
Also, as far as I know, Tidal hasn’t phased out MQA yet. But I hope to see the last of MQA and MQA-branded DACs.
Well, according to the iPhone specs, it does support FLAC but not natively - from what I understand, only through Apple's Files app so I use Vox. I had the same beef as well before, that's why I was hesitant to change over from Android to IOS. Android phones have been supporting FLAC for a while now and this is another example of Apple playing silly b*ggers with the rest of us.
I jumped ship from Tidal to Qobuz a long time ago, but my understanding is that Tidal’s non-MQA standard res “lossless” files were somehow derived from the MQA versions they already had on their servers, thus making them an even further degraded version of an already degraded version, so their particular brand of 16/44.1 files wouldn’t match the studio provided 16/44.1 everyone else was serving up… what a mess, thankfully no other services got caught up in the MQA scam to begin with. I wish them a slow and painful ending.
Both pale to listening to music via a real CD in a high-end CD player.
If you’re referring to the Bloomberg article, there is nothing in there saying that this Supremium tier (or whatever it ends up being called) will be priced the same as Apple Music.
Even as a current subscriber to Spotify Premium Family, ultimately it boils to price. It looks increasingly likely that I’m not going to get Hi-Fi for what I’m paying now and then when you factor other subs in, you can understand why the lure of Apple Music (and in turn Apple One) then comes into play.
I listen to Apple Music almost exclusively on my AirPod Pro's, so the higher quality music is pretty much a marketing gimmick for me.
I switched from Spotify when they started hosting Joe Rogan and as long as he's on the platform I'm unlikely to go back.
AM has been fine and I like how it integrates with my local music, but I definitely find that I discover less new music compared to Spotify. I'm not sure it's just the algorithm, or the way the app is set up, but Spotify was just better at that and I miss it.
Anyway, it is what it is.
I switched from Spotify when they started hosting Joe Rogan and as long as he's on the platform I'm unlikely to go back.
AM has been fine and I like how it integrates with my local music, but I definitely find that I discover less new music compared to Spotify. I'm not sure it's just the algorithm, or the way the app is set up, but Spotify was just better at that and I miss it.
Anyway, it is what it is.
Is it much better to give your money to a company using slaves in the supply chain for their trillion dollar corporation. I wonder what Rogan did that you perceive to be worse.
Spotify is much the superior product as you say. I can't fathom how Apple Music is still so bad after eight years.
