Yesterday, Apple announced that its Apple Music streaming service will add two new features next month. One of them will be a nice improvement and is likely to improve your experience listening to music. As for the other addition … well, there is a good chance that you won’t notice it at all. Fortunately, there is no extra charge for either of these additions.
Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos
Spatial Audio is the name that Apple gives to certain surround sound technology. Apple first announced Spatial Audio when it previewed iOS 14 on June 22, 2020. iOS 14 was released on September 17, 2020, and it brought support for Spatial Audio on the AirPods Pro. I’ve been using it since that time, and I’ve been very impressed. Unlike stereo, where you just hear things on the left or right, when you listen to something with Spatial Audio enabled, you can hear sounds coming from specific locations around you. It is very neat, and it works with many major video streaming services including Apple TV+. The AirPods Max, which was introduced on December 8, 2020, also supports Spatial Audio. Videos with Spatial Audio can do a decent job of replacing a home theater experience.
Yesterday, Apple announced that it is bringing Spatial Audio to Apple Music next month, with support for Dolby Atmos. Thus, instead of just listening to traditional stereo music, you will be able to listen to songs in which specific instruments or other sounds appear to be located in specific places all around and above you. And while Spatial Audio for movies currently requires the AirPods Pro or AirPods Max, Apple announced yesterday that you will able to listen to Spatial Audio/Dolby Atmos songs “on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, as well as the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.”
Songs need to be remastered in Spatial Audio. Apple says that there will be thousands of songs at launch, with more added over time.
What will it sound like? Apple hasn’t released any samples yet, but if you have used Spatial Audio with AirPods Pro to listen to a movie or TV show, you already have some sense of it. But perhaps a better way to get a sense of how it will sound is to go to this page on the Dolby website while you are using AirPods or other headphones with your iPhone. They have some great samples on that page, including songs where you can switch between stereo and Dolby Atmos. The difference is pretty stunning.
I’m looking forward to this addition. I don’t often listen to music with my AirPods Pro. I’m more likely to listen to music in my car or using a HomePod mini. But when I do so, for a song that supports Spatial Audio/Dolby Atmos, I expect the song to sound much richer.
Lossless Audio
I remember the days when folks would download very low bitrate songs from questionable services like Napster, and the audio quality was rather poor. Nowadays, the songs on streaming audio services such as Apple Music sound quite good. But what if they sounded even better, with even fewer compression artifacts? Apple says that with lossless audio, “Apple Music subscribers will be able to hear the exact same thing that the artists created in the studio.” Okay, but will it actually make a difference? I have doubts.
Lossless audio is nothing new. Back in 2014, Neil Young was involved in a Kickstarter campaign for the PonoPlayer, a device that used 20x more data than a normal MP3 file. It was supposed to provide a superior listening experience. But when David Pogue, who at the time was writing for Yahoo Finance, ran a blind test between the PonoPlayer and normal MP3 files, he couldn’t tell the difference. And Pogue is a former professional musician. He then had others test a PonoPlayer versus an iPhone, and they couldn’t tell a difference either. In the many years since that 2015 article, I’ve seen countless others say that most folks simply cannot tell the difference between modern MP3 music (or the similar AAC system that Apple uses) and songs with a higher bit rate. Jason Cross discussed this a few weeks ago in an article for Macworld where he concluded that almost nobody can hear the difference. His article includes a link to a website where you test to see if you can hear the difference. I could not.
But even if you are one of the rare people who can hear the slight difference, you will need to use different equipment to experience Lossless Audio. Chris Welch of The Verge reports that none of Apple’s current wireless products support Lossless Audio, so you cannot use this with AirPods, AirPods Pro, HomePod, HomePod mini, etc. Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac explains why, and it has to do with the current limitations of Bluetooth technology.
So you need to use wired headphones, or an Apple TV or Mac connected to nice speakers. And to use the highest quality that Apple will offer — Hi-Resolution Lossless at 24 bit at 192 kHz — you will need to add external equipment, such as a USB digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
So why is Apple even offering Lossless Audio? I think the reason is that, later this year, Spotify is offering a premium service called Spotify HiFi, which also includes lossless music. By offering Lossless Audio at no extra charge, Apple probably hopes to avoid people picking Spotify over Apple Music because of this difference — even if it is a difference that most folks won’t be able to notice.
Are all of these lossless music formats just snake oil? Perhaps. But having said that, I’ve been to dinner at fancy restaurants when people have ordered very expensive bottles of wine, and I’ll admit that I’ve enjoyed that wine. Was I actually tasting the difference between a very expensive bottle of wine and a good, but less expensive, bottle? I doubt it, but there is something to be said for the experience. And if the experience of listening to lossless music makes you feel better about your music, while then I say, go for it. Especially if you don’t have to pay extra for it. But just be aware that if you were to listen to a blind test, you might not be able to tell the difference.
Conclusion
Lossless Audio is not going to make much of a difference for me, and I doubt it will make a difference for most of you. But I think that Spatial Audio music with support for Dolby Atmos will be a nice upgrade to Apple Music, so I was happy to see that announcement yesterday. Plus, it is something that no other music streaming service is offering — at least, not yet. Sometimes I listen to Jazz music without lyrics when I am getting work done, and if I find myself immersed in what seems to be three-dimensional jazz music, perhaps that will help me to get even more into the groove while I am writing the next brief. And I suspect that Spatial Music will cause me to listen to more music on my AirPods Pro instead my HomePod mini when I want a superior listening experience.