Unless it was designed for ATMOS (or similar), I agree... 'spatial' audio etc is a way to move more units for record companies and audio manufacturers alike.

dfnt: Not overly impressed to be honest

I find with Dolby atmos/spatial audio on the bass is almost non existent, vocals too in focus and weird reverb

I prefer the music with spatial audio turned off

Hi-resolution lossless though ... inject that directly into my aorta please.

Many of the albums I have sampled only have the High Res Lossless or Apple Digital Master logo - have only listened to the sample of the Spatial Audio on the Apple Music app with Zane Lowe chatting about how amazing it is and sampling a Marvin Gaye track. 

Not a lot of difference for me as I have AirPods Pro, which aren't capable of playing lossless anyway, as they're Bluetooth. 

dfnt: Not overly impressed to be honest

I find with Dolby atmos/spatial audio on the bass is almost non existent, vocals too in focus and weird reverb

I prefer the music with spatial audio turned off

I agree 100%. On my AirPods Max, listening to songs like Blinding Lights (The Weeknd) with Dolby Atmos, I'm having to crank the volume to 95–100% to even have it at an enjoyable level, and even then it's too quiet.

With Dolby Atmos deactivated, 100% volume would be suicide for my ear drums (but it means it's nice and loud at 70%).

I wonder if they need to make some tweaks in terms of the volume output – because currently I'm terrified of skipping from an Atmos track to a "normal" one and having my eardrums explode.

I'm hoping that Sonos will support Apple Music lossless natively at some point, but in the meantime I assume I can still Airplay it (albeit not in hi-res). 

Apple's strategy here is really odd. A few months ago they released a $1000 pair of premium headphones which are not capable of connecting directly to an analogue source. So, the only way to use Airpods Max in a wired situation is to use the lightning to 3.5mm adaptor, connected to the 3.5mm to lightning adaptor, which noone is seriously going to do because it involves multiple D/A conversions. Why didn't they just release a lightning to lightning cable so that the Airpods Max could take a digital signal directly from an iPhone?

I'm really glad I didn't buy the Airpods Max because the Sennheiser Momentum 3 is looking like a much better alternative given its ability to take an analogue signal. 

As for Atmos, it sounds like a gimmick to me. 

alasta:

 

I'm hoping that Sonos will support Apple Music lossless natively at some point, but in the meantime I assume I can still Airplay it (albeit not in hi-res). 

 

I have been thinking about this (AM on Sonos) recently too - drawn by the possibility of lossless music. So earlier this morning I started a three-month trial of AM and started using it in the Sonos app. Suddenly it all came back to me - that I can't stand Apple Music. Years ago I never liked the way iTunes worked - how it takes over from you because Apple thinks it know better than you do what you want to do. I thought maybe AM has evolved - but no, or at least not much. Eg. It seems you still can't can't add variety to a music station and are restricted to one seed.

I'm a huge Apple fan but not of Apple Music. I won't go on with the trial, let alone use it after it ends. I'll continue using my legacy free music-streamer that used to be in NZ but who withdrew a few years ago. It's not supported here now but I can still use it via my DNS-changing service. It's fully supported by Sonos and works brilliantly. It has infrequent, short US adverts but it's free and it allows me to create music stations and add to them whatever seeds of other artists and genres I want. I'd prefer no ads but prepared to put up with that for all the other features and benefits.

Obligatory link to NPR site with quiz for reality checking:

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

If you think you have magic ears, then you probably can't be convinced otherwise, but whatever...

My biggest complaint with Apple Music from a UX perspective is that various masters of the same song are not grouped together. If you are looking at a list of tracks it often consists of a clutter of different masters of various different songs, with varying quality. 

In order to fully appreciate lossless reproduction you are probably going to have to spend a whole lot of time finding the best master of each song that you want to listen to. 

Fred99:

 

Obligatory link to NPR site with quiz for reality checking:

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

 

If you think you have magic ears, then you probably can't be convinced otherwise, but whatever...

 

 

 

I don't have magic ears by any means, but there are definitely some places in some music where I can hear compression artifacts in MP3. AAC is much better (which is not just my opinion but backed up by actual studies) but still not perfect, and even the average person would notice if they were paying enough attention. So, lossless? Yes absolutely I believe there's a benefit with even average equipment.

High resolution? Now that's a much more difficult question - for sure you're not going to hear the difference with a crappy built-in motherboard audio or 99% of wireless headphones. But by preference I use a dedicated headphone DAC that can do 96/24 and a decent but not super-expensive pair of Sennheiser headphones, which is about the minimum where you might notice.

It also depends on the source. If the original master was 44.1/16 digital then transcoding it makes it worse. But if the original was analog or a high res digital then yes it can make a difference. I have some DVD-Audio where you can hear the original soft hiss of the master tape.

Tried this yesterday with the stock standard Apple wired Airpods and was quite impressed, so much so that I turned around to see what the heck was the loud music going on beside me.

One problem I did find was data usage on the mobile. Apple Music lets you know your old music is at the lowest audio quality and whether you would like to update to a higher quality. It re-downloaded one album, a few favorites and after a few songs thought I better check data use.......... and 1.6Gb gone.

Have now turned off Download over Mobile.......for a little while at least. I can see a lot of people getting burnt by this.

Grunta47:

 

Tried this yesterday with the stock standard Apple wired Airpods and was quite impressed, so much so that I turned around to see what the heck was the loud music going on beside me.

 

One problem I did find was data usage on the mobile. Apple Music lets you know your old music is at the lowest audio quality and whether you would like to update to a higher quality. It re-downloaded one album, a few favorites and after a few songs thought I better check data use.......... and 1.6Gb gone.

 

Have now turned off Download over Mobile.......for a little while at least. I can see a lot of people getting burnt by this.

 

That's a good shout! Hadn't thought about that...

SaltyNZ:

 

Fred99:

 

Obligatory link to NPR site with quiz for reality checking:

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

 

If you think you have magic ears, then you probably can't be convinced otherwise, but whatever...

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't have magic ears by any means, but there are definitely some places in some music where I can hear compression artifacts in MP3. AAC is much better (which is not just my opinion but backed up by actual studies) but still not perfect, and even the average person would notice if they were paying enough attention. So, lossless? Yes absolutely I believe there's a benefit with even average equipment.

 

High resolution? Now that's a much more difficult question - for sure you're not going to hear the difference with a crappy built-in motherboard audio or 99% of wireless headphones. But by preference I use a dedicated headphone DAC that can do 96/24 and a decent but not super-expensive pair of Sennheiser headphones, which is about the minimum where you might notice.

 

It also depends on the source. If the original master was 44.1/16 digital then transcoding it makes it worse. But if the original was analog or a high res digital then yes it can make a difference. I have some DVD-Audio where you can hear the original soft hiss of the master tape.

 

While I think that you're probably correct about poorly encoded and/or low bandwidth MP3s, I think most of the rest is mind over matter.

You can easily hear tape hiss on many pre-digital recordings with low bitrate MP3. 

I can’t see where you turn it on. Do you have to subscribe to Apple Music to see it?

At settings music can only see quality settings for mobile data.

If you're pushing things over another lossy codec like bluetooth then the source codec makes a huge difference as you then have 2 lots of "thats not important so I will discard it" decisions on the same audio. Spotifys codec is fine on aux out but really bad over SBC bluetooth, tollerable over AAC bluetooth and fine on apt-x etc. Whereas it seems that google youtube red premium's music is acceptable over SBC bluetooth and about the same source bitrate.