Why does Apple force lossless music, which AirPods don’t even support?

Apple Music strikes hard.

Not long ago, Apple announced that it would provide a "lossless" sound quality option for the entire Apple Music library and launch a "spatial audio" feature based on the Dolby Atmos standard. And all lossless and spatial audio content will be directly included in the Apple Music subscription at no extra charge.

This is a dimensionality reduction blow to the entire streaming music industry. Tidal, another music service that focuses on Hi-Fi and also provides "high-resolution lossless" music, charges twice the subscription fee for "lossless sound quality", $20 per month. Spotify, the world's largest music service by users, does not have a lossless option.

The news that Apple Music supports lossless audio has sparked heated discussions. Everyone soon discovered that Apple's own headphones and speakers do not support "lossless" playback, including the AirPods Max, which was launched last year and features "high-fidelity sound quality." The discussion gradually fermented into controversy, and on the 24th, Apple quickly launched a Q&A page to answer questions related to "lossless audio quality" in detail. It explained why Bluetooth headphones cannot support lossless audio, and promised to support lossless audio for HomePod speakers in subsequent software updates.

Since the iPod era, Apple has never been interested in "lossless". Apple's product philosophy emphasizes thinness, comfort, and freedom from burden, which is completely contrary to the practice of music enthusiasts who "give up everything in pursuit of sound quality". In recent years, Apple has vigorously promoted wireless products and sold more than 200 million AirPods. Their original design intention is obviously not to be used for "lossless listening".

Is it a contradiction for Apple to launch "lossless" audio quality at this time? What does it mean?

Apple's "anti-lossless"

Apple is a company that made its fortune in the music business, but it has never been in the Hi-Fi business.

20 years ago, when Jobs released the iPod, his core focus was "efficiency". He compared it with CD, flash MP3 and other players, emphasizing that the core advantage of the iPod is that it has a built-in 5G hard drive that can store 1,000 songs. These 1,000 songs must not be CD-quality lossless music.

Jobs' goal for the iPod was simple: to allow users to carry their entire music library with them. With this goal in mind, the iPod became thinner and lighter, and its capacity became larger and larger. In the following years, Apple launched the lightest iPod shuffle, which weighed only 11g, and the iPod classic, which had a capacity of 160G and could hold 40,000 songs.

From this perspective, it is easy to understand why Apple has not been involved in the lossless Hi-Fi business. Apple products need to be thin, portable, efficient and easy to use, while most Hi-Fi devices, in order to achieve the most faithful restoration, require large audio files, complex decoding and amplification circuits, high-impedance headphones, and high-power power supplies to drive them, which ultimately makes the products bulky.

Early music enthusiasts would connect an audio amplifier to their iPod to drive high-impedance Hi-Fi headphones. | Unsplash 

Apple focuses on efficiency and portability, but that doesn't mean it doesn't care about "sound quality". In 2003, when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, it abandoned MP3, the most mainstream digital sound format in the industry, and chose the more advanced and more efficient, but still relatively niche AAC encoding. Hardware, software, services, the entire chain is in its own hands, allowing Apple to embrace more advanced technologies.

At first, Apple adopted the 128kbps bit rate standard, and a 4-minute song was only about 4M in size. Later, as the storage capacity of its products increased, Apple gradually upgraded the bit rate standard for song packaging to 192 and 256kbps.

Music encoded in AAC with a bit rate of 256kbps has been unanimously recognized by users and the industry. In terms of parameters, the theoretical sound quality of 256k AAC is even better than that of 320k mp3. However, it is difficult for human ears to distinguish the difference in sound quality between 320k mp3 and lossless CD, at least on consumer audio equipment. Only a few audiophiles can hear the subtle differences between the two through repeated AB comparisons with excellent playback equipment.

Since it was finalized in 2007, 256k AAC has become the gold standard of Apple's music ecosystem. From iTunes to Apple Music, it has been used for 14 years.

In 2017, Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and released the wireless headphones AirPods, which have sold over 200 million units to date. | Apple 

In 2017, Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and launched the AirPods Bluetooth headset. Phil Schiller called this a "courageous decision" at the launch conference because Apple believes that wireless can bring a better experience. In the first-generation product promotion video, Jony Ive said, "We believe in a wireless future."

Bluetooth wireless headphones are even more difficult to support lossless music playback. The highest bitrates supported by the current mainstream Bluetooth protocols are mostly between 328kbps and 576 kbps. Even the high-bitrate protocol LDAC launched by Sony only supports a maximum of 990kbps, which is far less than the 1411kbps required for CD lossless. Moreover, the higher the bitrate of the Bluetooth protocol, the lower the stability and transmission distance will be, and the higher the delay will be, which will lead to compromises in experience.

AAC audio encoding is the core of Apple's music ecosystem, so Apple also uses AAC encoding transmission on its own Bluetooth headphones such as AirPods and Beats. Compared with most Android phones connected to Bluetooth headphones, this method can save the process of decoding and encoding, improve the efficiency of signal transmission and conversion, and provide high-quality, low-latency audio experience as much as possible.

Whether it was the iPod era, when Apple made its products as portable as possible, or the iPhone era, when Apple embraced wireless technology, Apple is a company that emphasizes "music experience" rather than "Hi-Fi parameters." To some extent, you can even say that it is a pioneer in "opposing lossless."

Apple supports lossless

In its 20 years in the music business, Apple has made one or two attempts at Hi-Fi.

In 2004, Apple launched the Apple Lossless encoding format to meet the needs of CD listeners at the time. Users can convert digital CD files losslessly into a format supported by iPod and play them on iPod. In addition, the 30-pin interface used by iPod and early iPhone supports analog signal output. Users can also connect iPod to an audio amplifier and output to speakers losslessly.

In 2006, Apple also launched a speaker called iPod Hi-Fi, which was priced at $350. But Hi-Fi is a niche demand after all, and the positioning of this speaker is a bit "neither up nor down", which does not quite match the temperament of Apple's products. In the end, the sales performance was not ideal. More than a year later, iPod Hi-Fi was quietly discontinued. This was also Apple's last attempt to enter the Hi-Fi market.

In 2006, Apple launched the iPod Hi-Fi speaker. Later, Apple launched another speaker product, HomePod, which focused on sound quality, but also failed. | Apple

Although ALAC lossless encoding format has been launched for a long time, Apple has never sold "lossless music" in the iTunes store. One of the important reasons is that record companies are unwilling to do so. Before 2010, physical CD sales were still a good business. If the music sold in the iTunes store could reach CD quality, it might hurt the sales of physical CDs.

However, as the sales of physical records shrink year by year, streaming has long become the main source of income for the record industry. For record companies, licensing higher-quality music to Apple is no longer a difficult decision. In addition, the capacity of iPhones is getting bigger and bigger, and 5G brings faster transmission speeds. The huge file size of lossless music will no longer bring too much extra burden to users.

The lossless music that Apple will provide on Apple Music is based on the ALAC encoding format. In addition to CD-level lossless sound quality, Apple will also provide 192kHz / 24bit "high-resolution lossless". The "amount of information" that this specification of audio files can hold is theoretically equivalent to 5 times that of CDs. Apple devices themselves do not even support decoding, and users need to connect an external decoder to listen.

For Apple, as long as the record companies allow, providing lossless content to users is a piece of cake. Because Apple has long required record companies to submit high-standard "digital master audio sources" to them, which requires the recording specifications to be at least 44.1kHz and native 24bit. These masters are stored in the Apple Music database, and Apple only needs to package them according to lossless standards before providing them to users.

In an early technical document, Apple explained why it asked record companies for high-quality masters: "As technology advances, bandwidth, storage capacity, battery life, and processor performance will increase, and we can take advantage of the quality of these masters to enhance the music experience." It is obvious that Apple has long had plans to provide higher quality music.

The entire Apple Music library will support "lossless" sound quality, and Apple will put a "lossless support" logo on the album page. | Apple

For Apple, "providing lossless content" is simple, but combining lossless content with its own software and hardware products is not necessarily the case. Over the past decade or so, Apple has made various software and hardware optimizations for music, all of which are based on the lossy AAC encoding standard.