After many leaks and speculations, Apple decided to waste the beans and officially announced two major upgrades to its Apple Music service. Apple Lossless Audio and Spatial Audio are the new audio weapons that are supposed to challenge Spotify and other platforms that offer high-resolution audio resolution.
The upgrade comes to all subscribers in June at no extra cost, and some pending questions just ask to be answered. What is Apple Lossless Audio? Is it better than MP3? Can you listen to lossless sound using your AirPods? Read on to find out!
What is lossless sound?
Sound is analog in its kind, and every digital music format is not lossless, at least in theory. Let’s take the sound quality of the Compact Disc as it is the widely accepted standard for lossless sound.
On many CDs you can see something like 16 bit / 44.1 kHz written somewhere. This means that the recording uses “snapshots” of the original sound 44,100 times per second. The 16-bit number shows only the audio palette that the system can distinguish between.
Lost formats like MP3 remove unnecessary information such as silent passages, frequencies that the human ear just can’t hear, etc. Whether or not you can really hear the difference, it’s pretty subjective. You can take this test and see if you can spot the lossless sample.
Is Apple Lossless better than MP3?
So the answer to this question is “Yes”. On paper, this new ALAC technology is better than MP3 when it comes to audio information preserved in the music file.
Is Apple Lossless as good as FLAC?
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is another coding technology that became popular among audiophiles within the last 20 years. It offers audio resolutions from 16-bit / 44.1 kHz up to 24-bit / 192 kHz, so it’s very similar to Apple’s own lossless format.
However, the algorithms behind Apple Lossless Audio are not as efficient as those used by FLAC, resulting in larger files in general. That said, the sound quality should be pretty similar, then another “Yes” on this.
Can you listen to Apple Lossless Audio using AirPods, AirPods Pro or AirPods Max?
How can you listen to Apple Lossless Audio?
Lossless support is coming to Apple HomePod and HomePod mini in a future software update, so if you own one of these, stay tuned.
