There are only lossless (CD-quality) streaming services with a sprinkling of hi-res-encoded titles - typically less than 10% of the total library. If you’re frustrated by the paucity of hi-res audio content on Apple Music, consider this: there is no such thing as a hi-res streaming service. Neil Young is a good starting point but only a few of his albums are marked as ‘hi-res lossless’. Apple Music gives us no way to slice their catalogue by sample rate so we have to go a-huntin’ and a-peckin’. The next step is to find some of that hi-res lossless content. (Let’s get it out of the way early: the Apple Remote app cannot control Apple Music streaming, only locally stored audio.)īefore we hook up the hardware, we must update to iOS 14.6 and then activate the ‘hi-res lossless’ option in the Apple Music settings pane: look for the drop-down menu item that indicates access to 24bit/96kHz and 24bit/192kHz content. What follows will also work with an iPhone but I think the iPad’s larger touchscreen is better suited to hifi system hookups, largely because Apple Music’s album cover art display is more easily seen from the listening position. iPad Pro and 2020 iPad Air users whose devices rock a USB-C port can skip out on the CCK. The latter is sometimes referred to as the Camera Connection Kit or CCK. That leaves us with one way to tap Apple Music’s ‘hi-res lossless’ content: an iPad, connected to a USB DAC with Apple’s Lightning-to-USB adapter. To recap briefly: AirPlay and Apple TV OS are limited to 24bit/48kHz, macOS doesn’t offer automatic sample rate switching, Android resamples all audio to 48kHz and Google Chromecast doesn’t do gapless playback. In my previous post on hi-res audio on Apple Music, I detailed how Apple’s ‘hi-res lossless’ content – 24bit/96kHz or 24bit/192kHz streams – are often downsampled or resampled by the playback hardware, often unbeknownst to the end-user and thus negating the benefits of streaming a hi-res file.
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