Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
The bad side of SA might be that once Apple has a sufficient amount of songs with it, being Apple they might decide to charge extra for it. We have to pay companies like Netflix more money to stream 4K. We get charged more for renting HD rather than SD, and more again for renting 4K rather than HD video on Amazon. Time will tell. Thankfully for me I won’t be tempted by SA because my ears won’t be able to really benefit from it.
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Actually it has gone the other way: Amazon and Spotify dropped their premium for hi-res streaming shortly after Apple announced theirs would remain the same price. And I think publishers will not want to put all of their eggs in the Apple basket, and the other services will start offering Dolby Atmos as well.
I don’t think SA adds much to bandwidth requirements [it turns out to be less than Lossless], and there is not nearly enough of such content now to charge extra. My sense is that it’s currently labor intensive to re-master and do a good job of it, but no doubt ML will soon do as well, and cheaply.
Here is download size difference for
In The Heights album:
High Quality: 153.3 MB (AAC 256 kbps)
Lossless: 866.3 MB (ALAC up to 24-bit/48 kHz)
High-Resolution Lossless: not available for this album
Dolby Atmos: 554.1 MB (unknown bit rate etc)
The somewhat confusing part is there are 2 places in Settings for Apple Music that control what gets downloaded:
1. Audio Quality
It appears the default download quality is ‘High Quality’ AAC 256. But if you toggle Lossless Audio, you can pick between that and Lossless (ALAC up to 24-bit/48 kHz) or High-Resolution Lossless (ALAC up to 24-bit/192 kHz)
2. Download in Dolby Atmos toggle
If you select this, it overrides whatever was set in (1.)
Note that for High-Resolution Lossless, apparently you have to use an external DAC to preserve the full resolution for whatever (wired) headphones you plug in.
It surprises me that the Lightning (or USB-C) connector analog out (using whatever on board DAC there is) isn’t good enough. Evidently the chips needed are prohibitively large to put in the phone/tablet (the DAC’s I have seen are about 2/3 the size of a medium size smartphone, and thicker).