Apple Music Review
50th Anniversary of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in High-Resolution Multi-Channel Audio! You could never get this from vinyl! bigger or fit-to-screen.
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The Whole World, in Lossless Bit-for-Bit Perfection
We all know that pretty much everything ever released is available on Apple Music (subscribe), and the best thing about it is how it's so easy to find great new and old music we never new existed. In the olden days of the 1980s we were lucky if we found a music store that let us listen to a CD before we bought it, and now we can listen to just about anything ever recorded for one low monthly price.
What few people realize is that for the first time in history (this came out quietly in June 2021 and no one outside of pro audio noticed), Apple Music has everything available in Lossless quality, meaning that if you really want that much data, streaming Apple Music will bring you every single bit exactly as it was mastered — all for the same low monthly price as always.
Each lossless song takes about 50 MB as opposed to about 5 MB in the usual compressed formats, and every one of those 50 million bits will be exactly as the producer signed-off on at the mastering facility. Like all lossless data transmission, there is an error detection and correction system that checks and ensures you received every bit perfectly, and if not, resends the correct data before the file starts to play.
Not only is everything available losslessly, much of Apple Music is available in High Resolution Audio ("Hi-Res" as shown above), and you can't see it above, but album art like Dark Side of the Moon is often animated. You can't get that from a vinyl record!
To get lossless files, select them on your iPhone at Settings > Music > Audio Quality > Lossless Audio > ON, and then select for which data services (cellular, Wi-Fi etc.) you'd prefer lossless and at what sample rates (up to 48 ksps or 192 ksps). Similar settings are on iPad, Mac and Apple TV.
I use lossless only on Wi-Fi and 5G; I select regular 256 kbps "High Quality" files for cellular and downloads which sound the same as lossless and use a lot less data. Use whichever you like; this is why Apple gives us these choices. Also in this menu you can select a lower (circa 80 kbps) HE-AAC data rate for the cellular connection if you have a slow connection or otherwise want to keep your cellular data usage to a minimum.
I know mastering and recording engineers who will pull music files they need for projects right off of lossless Apple Music (with rights cleared of course).
All the older specialized "high res" streaming services and specialty sellers of fancy audio files are now obsolete. The Apple ecosystem distributes files at least as good, and most importantly makes them easy to find and enjoy, and Apple Music has just about everything, not just new high-res files of increasingly dynamically compressed remasters of the same old rock and roll as these other services offered. I'll be honest: I signed up for HDTracks (an old-style download-only service) probably ten years ago, and never did get it to work or download! Like everything Apple, Apple Music just works.
While I have thousands of CDs stored in my iTunes library and as files in my iPhone, and regardless of how much we love our favorite music - no subscription needed, the best part of Apple Music is how often I discover new albums and artists, and decades-old albums and artists new to me that I really love.
What is Dolby Atmos Multichannel?
Play Apple Music through your multichannel home theatre system and you'll hear things coming from all over the room. Apple calls it "Spatial Audio," which is Dolby Atmos. It's not just arbitrary ambience in the rear, it's multiple hard, discrete channels.
Much of everything released or remastered recently is available for the first time ever in discrete multichannel!!! This is for pure music alone enjoyed with our eyes closed, not necessarily with pictures, movies or video (although there are some bonus music videos on Apple Music).
Dolby Atmos is better than any number of discrete channels. In olden days you'd have to put an exact number of speakers in your room in exactly the spots the record producers expected, like four speakers for quadriphonic in the 1970s or six speakers for 5.1 in the 1990s. Atmos does this so much better because producers now can pan their audio objects (up to 118 discrete audio objects as well as a 9.1 bed) to any position in 3D space, and then your decoder calculates how to put that sound or object in just the right place using the speakers you already have.
Atmos lets studios mix sounds and audio objects among an almost unlimited number of virtual speaker positions in every direction in three dimensions, and here's the coolest part about Atmos: because you program your DAC/Decoder/Receiver/Preamp with exactly what sort of speakers you have and exactly where they are, your Atmos DAC/Decoder/Receiver/Preamp does all the mathematics to reproduce all those exact sound sources as best it can with your existing set of speakers, synthesizing virtual locations in between the speakers you have!
Atmos calls itself an "object based" system, meaning it doesn't care how many speakers you have; it puts things where they need to go so long as your decoder is set for what speakers you have where. I use the cheapest $500 Yamaha receiver I could find with preamp outputs to feed my professional American amps back in 2018 before I even knew what Atmos was. It was easy to program in 2018 before Apple Music introduced multichannel, and today in 2024 it sounds great with Atmos sources.
It scared the heck out of me the first time because Apple never really explained what was Spatial Audio, which seemed more like a stereo synthesizer for adding ambiance to stereo headphones at the time. One day for grins I fired up Apple Music on my Apple TV in my theater, some songs appeared as Dolby Atmos as Dark Side of the Moon appears above, and sound started flying all around the room. You really gotta hear this for yourself.
You don't need a 9.1.4 speaker setup to enjoy Atmos. Speaker makers will try to scare you into buying dozens of speakers, but it's not important so long as you program your decoder with what you do have. While Dolby points out that Atmos streams address up to 64 discrete speakers, I use just 6.2 (actually 2.2.4 in Atmos-speak, and the x.x.4 are just crappy speakers inside my ceiling) and it sounds awesome because Atmos uses psychoacoustics to put sounds where they belong regardless of your setup. Heck, some mastering studios use 7.1.4 arrays, so it's great that you don't have to rearrange your speakers for each song.
For guys like me it's amazing that Apple goes to this trouble for the three of us dedicated music lovers who actually enjoy all these advancements for pure music without pictures or video. I close my eyes and get lost in the music.
It brings such a smile to my face when I hear a well-done Atmos mix that starts off relatively normal, and suddenly the choruses or a solo comes from all around the room. Musicians finally have a universal way to distribute multichannel audio that's never existed before.
Even classical music, both new and remastered, has the natural room ambience coming at you from all over, just like the concert hall. No longer do we have to imagine the sound of a three-dimensional room from just two channels. Most everything has been recorded in multichannel for decades (like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon from 1973, which was one of, if not the first album to have been recorded with Dolby A tape noise reduction), but it had to be mixed-down and mastered to simple stereo since there was no successful way to get multichannel to the home. SQ LPs, 4-track reel-to-reels and SACDs have long been forgotten, thank goodness. Subscribe and it's all the songs, channels and bits you can handle from Apple Music.
Records, vinyl and LPs can't get you this bit-for-bit quality, much less all the multiple channels in which modern music is recorded — and to which old music is being remastered every day. If you're in the music industry you know how much is mastered and how much back catalog is being remastered into Atmos each week; stereo was so 1958. (Insider tip: almost all vinyl is mastered from digital files. Even if it was originally recorded on analog, the studio isn't sending out fragile and deteriorating analog tapes which today require special baking (like cookies) just to get them to play; they send out durable digital files to vinyl mastering houses. Love LPs for big (but static) cover art and liner notes and nostalgia, but for the music itself, stick with Apple Music for the best quality, same as getting the masters yourself from the studios.)
Best Dark Side Version Yet — And So Easy to Find and Play!
We love Apple so much because they make this all accessible. I'll admit I've been listening to Dark Side of the Moon since the 1970s on records (vinyl) whose limited dynamic range and distortion made it hard to hear much of the music (and got worse every time you played the record), and it sounded great on silent CDs since the 1980s. In the 2000s I bought the multichannel SACD for my multichannel Sony SCD-XA777ES SACD player, but in the past 20 years I've never bothered to hook up all the analog cables to hear it in 5.1!
Tonight on Apple Music with Dolby Atmos it was just a few clicks to call it up in my home theatre, and was the first time ever that I've heard Dark Side of the Moon in anything more than simple stereo, and of course it's amazing. Duh, Dark Side of the Moon was always destined for multichannel, and it's the best Atmos mix I've heard yet; it's a showpiece for it. Especially in "Time" and "On the Run" there are numerous effects running all over, and I realized that I'd never really heard what was going on in Dark Side of the Moon before tonight.
In stereo these effects are only one-dimensional, moving left and right along a line. In Atmos, they are two or three-dimensional, running all over the room, some in circles if the mixer wanted it that way. Not only are effects flying all over as we'd expect, but unexpected is what sounds like the use of subharmonic synthesizers on some of the bass tracks to fortify them in the very bottom octave that I've never heard on Dark Side of the Moon in other formats. You need a pretty hardcore system like mine that easily reproduces stereo subsonics down to 16 Hz to hear it, and if you can, it's pretty impressive. Again, I've never heard Dark Side of the Moon sound so good and alive, and the crazy part is how easy it is to find and cue up; a zillion times better than fumbling with disks.
Guess what else? While the whole world recognizes the iconic album cover showing what we all thought represented a glass prism, Apple Music's animated cover art shows a rotating four-sided pyramid! You never stop learning.
Lossless vs Multichannel
In Apple Music, "Lossless" refers to stereo mixes that are sent losslessly (every bit makes to you exactly), and Spatial or Atmos means the big multichannel mix, which I believe is encoded and transmitted as audibly (but not necessarily bit-for-bit) lossless.
You will hear huge differences between these two options, even if you're only listening in stereo. This has nothing to do with how it's coded for transmission and everything to do with the simple fact that the stereo (Lossless) and multichannel mixes are totally different projects, created at different times. They are supposed to sound very different — that's the whole point — it has nothing to do with the coding.
Finding Great Music
1.) When setting up Apple Music for the first time after you subscribe it will ask which kinds of music you'd like it to find for you. As a music lover I clicked just about every kind, which meant it now had no idea. There's no way to go back in and reselect just my main favorites, but:
2.) As you use Apple Music, be sure to click LOVE or SUGGEST LESS LIKE THIS as you hear songs you like — or not. It will take your hints and eventually fine-tune its suggestions, regardless of you making the right or wrong choices when you first set it up. As of iOS 17 I think it now calls these FAVORITE.
3.) Search for your favorite artist and you'll find albums you never knew existed — which are great!
4.) Search for your favorite song titles and you'll find versions by completely different artists, as well as probably other versions by the same artist you never knew existed.
5.) Use Shazam wherever you hear cool music in the background or used in a movie, and check them out in detail later.
6.) If you're listening in Stereo, 2-Channnel or just headphones, the Atmos (Spatial Audio) versions will sound different from the straight stereo versions. Neither is right or wrong; try them both to see which you prefer. I usually prefer the stereo version; in stereo the Atmos versions often sound fluffier and less spatially defined. Select these in settings; on the iPhone they're at Settings > Music > Dolby Atmos. This is like two subscriptions in one: you have your choice of stereo or Atmos versions when there's an Atmos mix — all part of the same subscription.
7.) Go through the new albums each week and just click-through the boring sound-alike ones to find the occasional gem.
An art teacher once shocked us admitting that 99% of all new art (and music) is garbage - but it's that 1% of great stuff that really matters. She explained that while 99% of new art is awful today, it's been this way for thousands of years. The reason we may appreciate older music or art and think everything today is so much worse is because we've forgotten about the old stuff that wasn't worth remembering or saving; it's only the great 1% that survives.
When I was in radio decades ago it was the same thing: only 1% of the promotional records that showed up were any good, but occasionally something like Peter Gabriel's first solo album would arrive. We had no idea what it was, no one had ever heard it until we threw it on a weird thing we called a turntable back then. Never think that new classics aren't created today. They are. Heck, while writing this article I discovered another related album from 2017, but new to me, that I love.
Apple Music is my favorite monthly subscription. I can't believe how many years it took me to take Apple up on their offer of the first few months free.
Bravissimo!!!
This all-content, junk-free website's biggest source of support is when you use any of those or these links to approved sources when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. Thanks for helping me help you! Ken.
Thanks for helping me help you!
Ken.
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