MUSIC FOR AUDIOPHILES GOES MAINSTREAM

Audiophile’s love their true-to-life realism and for them the world could be a better place going forward as Apple, Spotify and Amazon Music finally move to delivering high res or lossless audio.

Apple recently announced that they plan to deliver Lossless Audio for all 75 million songs in their library by the end of the year, at no extra cost to subscribers – along with Spatial Audio.

Spotify and Amazon Music are also following where Tidal have been for the last five years by upgrading their music streaming closer to how a piece of music was actually recorded.

For those who listen to portable or small networked speaker audio you will need the right gear to listen to Spatial Audio similar to what Apple is moving to in an effort to hold onto market share for their streaming service.

In the early days of digital music, the difference between lossless music and low-res mp3 recordings was dramatic, and anyone with halfway functional ears could easily hear the difference.

If you want to know just how bad things used to be in the early days, check out some 96Kbps mp3 recordings!

The best way to listen to streamed high-res content is over a wireless or 5G network that can handle the big lossless files.

But don’t start the test without reading on. (Oh, and don’t use mobile data to do it: lossless files are big!)

Bluetooth doesn’t have enough bandwidth for true lossless audio.

9 to 5 mac claims Apple appears to be fudging this issue somewhat, but when it comes to the full quality – what Apple calls Hi-Resolution Lossless.

If you are listening on AirPods or AirPods Pro, forget it: there’s just no way that you’re going to hear any difference.

What you need today is a good receiver such as the Marantz network offering that when hooked up to NBN broadband and a serious pair of speakers that can “recreate” what was actually laid down in a studio or concert hall, you will start to hear what was actually recorded.

Audiophile’s love Jazz Blues and Classical music and what’s coming is a large collection of content that was recorded at 24bit.

In the next issue of SoundMag we will take a look at what is on offer.

Bluetooth doesn’t have enough bandwidth for true lossless audio.