Photo credit: Dan Counsell
Apple Music praised lossless audio as a step forward in listening to music – but Apple manager Eddy Cue disagrees.
Cue is Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services – and the head of Apple Music. In a recent interview with Billboard, Cue said he doesn’t think people can tell the difference between lossless and compressed streaming audio.
“The reality of Lossless is, if you take 100 people and put a stereo song in Lossless and you take a song from Apple Music that is compressed, I don’t know if it’s 99 or 98.” [people that] I can’t tell the difference, ”says Cue.
“But our ears are not so good without loss. Yes, there are a number of people who have these incredible ears and that’s part of it. There’s another aspect: do you have the equipment that can really make the difference? It requires very, very high quality stereo equipment. “
“What you find is that someone who is a real, for example classic, connoisseur can tell the difference in lossless. I can’t say that personally – I do the blind tests with the team all the time – I can’t say. “
Apple’s own audio devices, AirPods and AirPods Max use the standard AAC codec over Bluetooth. It’s a lossy codec for wireless streaming, but you won’t get true “lossless audio” even when wired.
That’s because the AirPods Max use an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to convert the analog audio from the 3.5mm cable to digital format before passing it on to the actual audio drivers. The signal is reprocessed and no longer matches the source.
The result is a sound that is very close to the lossless file, but Apple won’t call it that because the file has been reprocessed. Listening to lossless high definition music still requires an external DAC no matter what devices you choose to use to stream the music.