Apple Hi-Res lossless via Airplay using Yamaha R-N303 / RxV683

[Drogon]

Hello audiophile's,

I am looking out options on Hi-Res audio from Apple Music without DAC .I have Yamaha N303, RxV683 playing through airplay . The quality of N303 is better than RxV683 . When checked N303 spec's , N303 support's Apple lossless 96khz/24bit .

1. Doesn't it mean I can play Hi-Res from airplay without DAC because most of the Hi-Res songs in Apple Music are 24bit/96khz ?
2. In contrast, I have read few threads airplay means 16/44.1 kHz

Experts need your input's . Thank you in advance

 

[mbhangui]

Airplay1 and Airplay2 both do not support HiRes and also do not support lossless if you use apple music. Apple music server in fact transcodes the lossless stream to AAC. Airplay1 can go upto 16/44.1. If you don't use Apple Music and play local files then the transcoding issue is not there. You can play lossless if your music file sampling rate is 44.1. AFAIK airplay2 can do upto 24bit/48kHz.

Steve Harris, Software Director of Naim Audio, describes the AAC AirPlay stream situation here (transcoded from lossless):

Apple Music HiFi Tier incoming?

Hi @Simon-in-Suffolk et all, Currently Apple are forcing an aac link on Airplay2 when using Apple Music, even if the ui is saying lossless. This was documented on one of their FAQ pages. So example: Now lets turn on the internal metrics airplay2 trace: Observe the aac 256kbit link...

community.naimaudio.com

What apple shows and what actually happens is totally different. In fact apple misleads. What the apple music UI shows is rubbish. More evidence here

Apple Music High Res

Unfortunately that’s true. Not even CD quality via Airplay 2 with Am. Seems somewhat dishonest. Have a look at the two photos; the first one woth Airplay! the second one via USB to DAC.

community.roonlabs.com

Currently Apple Music is a mess. Apple is playing catchup with the rest of the music industry as far as streaming is concerned. It will take them some time to put their streaming solution at par with other players.

As of now the only way to play apple music hires lossless is to use an Ipad or iphone connected to a USB dac using the camara connection kit (CCK).

 

[Drogon]

@mbhangui Thankyou for quick reply. Seems like we are left with only one option (Dac). Amazon Hd or Spotify launch soon

 

[uncle_lazy_at]

Similar thread. Probably it might help ? https://www.hifivision.com/threads/suggestion-for-apple-lossless.90818/

 

[dvraghavan]

As of now the only way to play apple music hires lossless is to use an Ipad or iphone connected to a USB dac using the camara connection kit (CCK).

I use Apple TV 4K and there is an option to play "Lossless". When I enable it, while playing audio, there is a "Lossless" logo on the screen as well. Is this really lossless? I have connected it to Yamaha RXv6A AVR.

 

[Drogon]

@dvraghavan

Nope, as per Apple support https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212183 . Apple TV 4K doesn't support Hi-Res lossless

Ref

 

[uncle_lazy_at]

I use Apple TV 4K and there is an option to play "Lossless". When I enable it, while playing audio, there is a "Lossless" logo on the screen as well. Is this really lossless? I have connected it to Yamaha RXv6A AVR.

Yes, lossless but not hi-res lossless.

Lossless - Upto 24 bit/48 kHZ
Hi Res - > 24 bit/48 kHZ to 24 bit/192 kHZ

But apple tv isnt bit perfect. Brother @mbhangui is an expert in this topic.

 

[Kannan]

Apple Music supports direct chormecast streaming. Is that lossless as Chromecast supports 24/96 on its optical output/

 

[mbhangui]

I use Apple TV 4K and there is an option to play "Lossless". When I enable it, while playing audio, there is a "Lossless" logo on the screen as well. Is this really lossless? I have connected it to Yamaha RXv6A AVR.

As others have found it (the post linked above), that 'losless logo' is misleading. The lossless logo means that apple music server is using the lossless version of the file and that's it. It doesn't mean that your end device is receiving it lossless or playing it lossless. The app indicates it's receiving lossless audio from Apple Music. The fact that it isn't sending this lossless audio to the AirPlay devices is not indicated anywhere for the consumer to see.

Lossless means every bit from the music file reaches the destination unaltered. Each and very bit unaltered at each and very sample rate. But ATV supports fixed 48kHz only. Which means every music files sampled at 44.1 kHz and above 48 kHz will be resampled to 48 kHz. This means ATV can play only 48kHz bit-perfect.

In contrast the apple airport express (now discontinued) can play music at any sample rate of 44.1 kHz and below. This is very different from ATV which plays at a fixed sample rate of 48 kHz. All of the CD quality music available will play better on the airport express or any computer providing airplay. ATV will give the worst quality unless the audio sample rate is 48 kHz. Only the movie industry samples audio at that rate. So ATV is good for movies but other endpoints will be better than ATV for music playback. So if you have any device, AVR, amplfier, computer that supports airplay, it will play music better than ATV, unless it is a movie, television series that you are watching.

As far as Apple Music is concerned, that is another animal. So if you are streaming to an airplay device the apple servers transcodes the music for streaming and uses the lossy version of the music file AAC instead of ALAC. So right from the source, a lossy version of the music is streamed, even though the logo shows 'Lossless'. So if you have a high quality music file on your hard disk, it will play better than streaming over apple music. This is what people have found out like the Naim Audio folks

This is another painstaking reasearch done by a guy. He goes on to say how people at Bluesound Note and others have to do so much in their streamers to clear the mess that apple is doing

Part 1

Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res Mess

This morning I've been testing Apple Music's new lossless and Hi-Res offerings on both my iPhone 12 Pro running iOS 14.6 and my Mac Mini (M1) running macOS 11.4. In my tests, I'm only concerned with playing the music bit perfectly, in other words without making any changes to the audio. If Apple ...

audiophilestyle.com

Part 2

Apple Music Lossless Mess Part 2: AirPlay

Earlier this month I dug into Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res offerings, running several bit perfect rests on the audio output of my Macs and iOS devices. The results were less than stellar (link). This week I dug into Apple Music lossless over AirPlay. One would think that the results would be...

audiophilestyle.com

 

[mbhangui]

Apple Music supports direct chormecast streaming. Is that lossless as Chromecast supports 24/96 on its optical output/

Chromecast isn't the issue here. Apple music will stream the AAC version instead of the ALAC version of the master. It seems that apple is deliberately streaming the lossy version to chromecast or it is because chromecast and chromecast audio do not support ALAC. But one shouldn't worry. Apple has done a good job with AAC and it is much better than mp3. People do find almost no difference between AAC and the original.

Apple Music Hi-Res on Android - playing to Chromecast Audio

So Apple Music on Android looks nice and Hi-Res is working well. Qobuz on Android can 'cast' up to 24/96k reliably to my Chromecast Audio - cool. Apple Music casting works fine to my Chromecast also. So Apple have allowed Chromecasting - cool. But you would also assume we should be able to...

www.audiosciencereview.com

See this from discussion on reddit

Most likely because the Chromecast is not streaming directly from your phone and is streaming from Apple servers.

Chromecasts do not support ALAC natively.

https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media

Audio codecs Chromecast Audio, Google Home, and Google Home Mini support the following list of codecs:

FLAC (up to 96kHz/24-bit) HE-AAC LC-AAC MP3 Opus Vorbis WAV (LPCM) WebM

So if Apple used FLAC, it would work. You can cast your audio from your phone to your Chromecast and then you'd get lossless and the new crossfade. I don't know what Codec casting uses in that setup though, so your mileage may vary.

Realistically, Apples AAC encodes are phenomenal, 99% of the people on this subreddit think they hear a difference but could never ABX between AAC and ALAC. So just cast the AAC version natively through Apple Music and enjoy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/od1kq4

 

[Kannan]

I pulled out the Chromecast Audio after a long time and tested it on my DAC. The toslink output defaults to 24bit/48khz when casting is set via Google Home App for whatever file i play including Apple Music.
But, when I cast via built-in chromecast feature on Apple Music or any player like VLC, then the output defaults to 44khz

 

[sachinchavan 15865]

As others have found it (the post linked above), that 'losless logo' is misleading. The lossless logo means that apple music server is using the lossless version of the file and that's it. It doesn't mean that your end device is receiving it lossless or playing it lossless. The app indicates it's receiving lossless audio from Apple Music. The fact that it isn't sending this lossless audio to the AirPlay devices is not indicated anywhere for the consumer to see.

Lossless means every bit from the music file reaches the destination unaltered. Each and very bit unaltered at each and very sample rate. But ATV supports fixed 48kHz only. Which means every music files sampled at 44.1 kHz and above 48 kHz will be resampled to 48 kHz. This means ATV can play only 48kHz bit-perfect.

In contrast the apple airport express (now discontinued) can play music at any sample rate of 44.1 kHz and below. This is very different from ATV which plays at a fixed sample rate of 48 kHz. All of the CD quality music available will play better on the airport express or any computer providing airplay. ATV will give the worst quality unless the audio sample rate is 48 kHz. Only the movie industry samples audio at that rate. So ATV is good for movies but other endpoints will be better than ATV for music playback. So if you have any device, AVR, amplfier, computer that supports airplay, it will play music better than ATV, unless it is a movie, television series that you are watching.

As far as Apple Music is concerned, that is another animal. So if you are streaming to an airplay device the apple servers transcodes the music for streaming and uses the lossy version of the music file AAC instead of ALAC. So right from the source, a lossy version of the music is streamed, even though the logo shows 'Lossless'. So if you have a high quality music file on your hard disk, it will play better than streaming over apple music. This is what people have found out like the Naim Audio folks

This is another painstaking reasearch done by a guy. He goes on to say how people at Bluesound Note and others have to do so much in their streamers to clear the mess that apple is doing

Part 1

Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res Mess

This morning I've been testing Apple Music's new lossless and Hi-Res offerings on both my iPhone 12 Pro running iOS 14.6 and my Mac Mini (M1) running macOS 11.4. In my tests, I'm only concerned with playing the music bit perfectly, in other words without making any changes to the audio. If Apple ...

audiophilestyle.com

Part 2

Apple Music Lossless Mess Part 2: AirPlay

Earlier this month I dug into Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res offerings, running several bit perfect rests on the audio output of my Macs and iOS devices. The results were less than stellar (link). This week I dug into Apple Music lossless over AirPlay. One would think that the results would be...

audiophilestyle.com

What a clearly worded reply throwing light on the ambiguity around Apple Music!

The irony is that AirPlay is quite capable to carry ALAC as one can do that if AirPlaying universally from a MacBook. Why Apple chooses to stream AAC instead of ALAC from a mobile through AirPlay is befuddling though! And their aversion to allow native streaming of AM on streamers is another downer.

 

[mbhangui]

What a clearly worded reply throwing light on the ambiguity around Apple Music!

The irony is that AirPlay is quite capable to carry ALAC as one can do that if AirPlaying universally from a MacBook. Why Apple chooses to stream AAC instead of ALAC from a mobile through AirPlay is befuddling though! And their aversion to allow native streaming of AM on streamers is another downer.

Indeed. There is nothing wrong with the airplay protocol. It can easily play bit-perfect as well as lossless. I still use apple's age old airport express devices and they are a marvel. They can act as a router. They can do PPOE. They can become a wireless bridge and on top of it they can carry bit-perfect losless music at 44.1K. But Apple has discontinued it. Most likely because they have stopped making network devices. They discontinued the airport extreme router too. The AAC too is very good and far better than mp3. My guess is that apple has become a big giant with so many different tech teams doing different things and things are slipping between the teams. This problem always happens when companies become too big.

 

[sachinchavan 15865]

My guess is that apple has become a big giant with so many different tech teams doing different things and things are slipping between the teams. This problem always happens when companies become too big.

Quite possible. But given that hardware-software integration and platform lock-in are value propositions that differentiates Apple, they better pay more attention (and resources) at this. I’d imagine there’s a team above these product-specific teams whose job is to ensure integration at the level of technology as well as strategy.

I still use apple's age old airport express devices and they are a marvel. They can act as a router. They can do PPOE. They can become a wireless bridge and on top of it they can carry bit-perfect losless music at 44.1K. But Apple has discontinued it.

Yes, Apple is quite proactive in dropping products/features that they believe aren’t making sufficient business sense, though they could be of great value to some segments, like the audiophile. The HomePod for example, was discontinued too quickly in favour of the HomePod mini. But there’s still a high demand for the original HomePods among discernible listeners.

 

[Appy12]

As others have found it (the post linked above), that 'losless logo' is misleading. The lossless logo means that apple music server is using the lossless version of the file and that's it. It doesn't mean that your end device is receiving it lossless or playing it lossless. The app indicates it's receiving lossless audio from Apple Music. The fact that it isn't sending this lossless audio to the AirPlay devices is not indicated anywhere for the consumer to see.

Lossless means every bit from the music file reaches the destination unaltered. Each and very bit unaltered at each and very sample rate. But ATV supports fixed 48kHz only. Which means every music files sampled at 44.1 kHz and above 48 kHz will be resampled to 48 kHz. This means ATV can play only 48kHz bit-perfect.

In contrast the apple airport express (now discontinued) can play music at any sample rate of 44.1 kHz and below. This is very different from ATV which plays at a fixed sample rate of 48 kHz. All of the CD quality music available will play better on the airport express or any computer providing airplay. ATV will give the worst quality unless the audio sample rate is 48 kHz. Only the movie industry samples audio at that rate. So ATV is good for movies but other endpoints will be better than ATV for music playback. So if you have any device, AVR, amplfier, computer that supports airplay, it will play music better than ATV, unless it is a movie, television series that you are watching.

As far as Apple Music is concerned, that is another animal. So if you are streaming to an airplay device the apple servers transcodes the music for streaming and uses the lossy version of the music file AAC instead of ALAC. So right from the source, a lossy version of the music is streamed, even though the logo shows 'Lossless'. So if you have a high quality music file on your hard disk, it will play better than streaming over apple music. This is what people have found out like the Naim Audio folks

This is another painstaking reasearch done by a guy. He goes on to say how people at Bluesound Note and others have to do so much in their streamers to clear the mess that apple is doing

Part 1

Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res Mess

This morning I've been testing Apple Music's new lossless and Hi-Res offerings on both my iPhone 12 Pro running iOS 14.6 and my Mac Mini (M1) running macOS 11.4. In my tests, I'm only concerned with playing the music bit perfectly, in other words without making any changes to the audio. If Apple ...

audiophilestyle.com

Part 2

Apple Music Lossless Mess Part 2: AirPlay

Earlier this month I dug into Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res offerings, running several bit perfect rests on the audio output of my Macs and iOS devices. The results were less than stellar (link). This week I dug into Apple Music lossless over AirPlay. One would think that the results would be...

audiophilestyle.com

Forgive my lack of technical know-how and inability to comprehend, but does this mean that connecting an iPad Pro via USB-C to a DAC would result in Apple switching to a lossy format automatically?
Is there a way to connect a dedicated ios device to a DAC and still stream bit-perfect?

 

[mbhangui]

Forgive my lack of technical know-how and inability to comprehend, but does this mean that connecting an iPad Pro via USB-C to a DAC would result in Apple switching to a lossy format automatically?
Is there a way to connect a dedicated ios device to a DAC and still stream bit-perfect?

No. You will get the best results for apple music if you connect a dac using USB C to your iPad or iPhone. But if you use an Android phone, any computer including MacBooks , ATV, windows or Linux laptop, the output will not be bit perfect. iOS does it perfectly. But iOS is available only on ipads and iPhone

 

[mbhangui]

Let me explain this in simpler terms. There are 3 lossless codecs

1. FLAC - This is a codec that apple doesn't understand. But windows, linux, FreeBSD, openBSD can use this codec. But this codec is not understood by apple devices using apple software (Apple Music, etc). But third party software can play FLAC like jriver mediacenter, audio nirvana, pine player, mpd and many others
2. ALAC - This is a codec that is proprietary to apple. Only apple devices can play this
3. DSD - This is a codec that windows, linux, BSD etc can use but apple music doesn't use this. But third party software on apple devices can play this (jriver, audio nirvana, mpd, etc)

AAC, mp3, etc are lossy codecs.

Problem 1
When you run apple music on a non-apple hardware or do airplay to a non-apple device, apple music will use the AAC. So when you use apple music on android or do send the stream usining airplay to a non-apple hardware, apple music detects that the end device cannot use ALAC. Hence it choses the AAC version of the music file. So whatever you do, what will get streamed will be a lossy version because the end devices cannot play ALAC codec. So linux, windows, chromecast, etc will never get the lossless version streamed to them from the apple music server.

Problem 2
Apple devices can play ALAC. So apple music server will send the lossless version (ALAC) to the device. So far so good. But all macbooks, ATV etc work on a fixed sample rate. Only the IPAD and Iphones can adjust the sample rate according to the sample rate of the source file of the master on apple music servers. So if you use macbooks (pro, air, mini) or apple tv they will play at a fixed sample rate. So if the ALAC source is encoded at 192 kHz sample rate, the devices will play at a fixed rate (ATV at 48 kHz, airplay at 44.1 kHz, macbooks at whatever sampling rate is set by the Audio Midi Setup App. So even if the source sent by the apple music server is a lossless stream, they will get played at a different sampling rate. However Ipad and Iphones can adjust the sampling rate as per the source. This essentially means that only Iphone and Ipads can play the music bit perfect. Macbooks can play bit perfect as long as you manually adjust the sampling rate for each and every song if it doesn't match the source sampling rate. Exception is the ATV which doesn't have any option to adjust the sampling rate and will always play at 48 kHz and airplay which will play only at 44.1 kHz.

Hope this explanation helps.

 

[sachinchavan 15865]

Macbooks can play bit perfect as long as you manually adjust the sampling rate for each and every song if it doesn't match the source sampling rate.

So all it takes is for Apple to write a code into the MacOS to automatically change the sampling rate based on the source material. What stops them from doing so through OS updates?

 

[mbhangui]

So all it takes is for Apple to write a code into the MacOS to automatically change the sampling rate based on the source material. What stops them from doing so through OS updates?

It beats me. It reminds me of some dumb programming by apple programmers. I was under the impression that microsoft hired dumb programmers. Apple is not far behind microsoft.

There is a feature called automount where the OS can automatically mount filesystrems from a remote server. If you want to mount a remote filesystem you require a username and password. So far so good. On mac if you want to automatically mount a filesystem on your NAS device when it is powered on with NTFS format with IP address 192.168.1.101. Then all you require is to create a file /etc/auto_smb like this. Here user is the username and the password is password

/System/Volumes/Data/Music -fstype=smbfs,soft,noowners,nosuid,rw ://user:[email protected]:/Music

So far so good

Now funny things happen when the password has an '@' symbol. Let us assume that the username is 'pi' and has set a password pass@@123. So the entry in /etc/auto_smb will be like this. Ignore the smiley that hifivision is replacing below.

/System/Volumes/Data/Music -fstype=smbfs,soft,noowners,nosuid,rw ://piass@@[email protected]:/Music

what apple programmers do is to try connecting to a host named @[email protected]. It will fail because the NAS device has the IP 192.168.2.101 but apple will try the IP address @[email protected] and will grandly explain that the IP address is invalid. What linux does is to look at the '@' symbol from the back, and will correctly connect to 192.168.2.101, correctly use the password as pass@@123 and mount the filesystem. Apple will spectacularly fail telling you that you are stupid to have selected an incorrect IP address. So in an apple ecosystem you can't have a '@' symbol in the password if you want to mount a shared drive.

This is not an apple bashing post. I agree that apple puts lot of thought in their hardware and their hardware design is spectacular. But when it comes to software, they are far behind Linux and a company like google. I do lot of low level programming with OSX, BSD and Linux. OSX is based on BSD but it is a shitty implementation. I have had my macbooks crash once in a while. But Linux has never crashed on me since 2006. Let;s not at all talk about Windows which crashes like crazy. If you want a ROCK solid production machine it can never be on Mac OSX or windows.

My dream would be Apple open sourcing their hardware with the base OS as Linux. As a matter of fact, Linus Torwald personal laptop is a macbook pro running Fedora Core Linux.

 

[sachinchavan 15865]

what apple programmers do is to try connecting to a host named @[email protected]. It will fail because the NAS device has the IP 192.168.2.101 but apple will try the IP address @[email protected] and will grandly explain that the IP address is invalid. What linux does is to look at the '@' symbol from the back, and will correctly connect to 192.168.2.101, correctly use the password as pass@@123 and mount the filesystem. Apple will spectacularly fail telling you that you are stupid to have selected an incorrect IP address. So in an apple ecosystem you can't have a '@' symbol in the password if you want to mount a shared drive.

Ah, too technically dense for me to understand, but got the essence.

This is not an apple bashing post.

Of course not. Bashers make irrational, sweeping statements, you are substantiating with concrete examples and deeper explanations.

I agree that apple puts lot of thought in their hardware and their hardware design is spectacular. But when it comes to software, they are far behind Linux and a company like google.

I see that. The longevity and performance of my Apple devices corroborates their hardware prowess. Even on the software side, I feel (as a user) they are better at UI design. Deeper down into the software (logic etc) is where they might be limited. But majority of the (non-technical) mobile users, like me, value the ease of use/intuitiveness of the UI and don’t quite need to use even the laptops in the ways programmers would.