[golfbravobravo]

The post on Audiophile Style from Chris Connaker is mainly about that he has a method (using hardware) of verifying whether something is bit perfect and the Apple Music lossless stream is failing that test. He speculates that it's due to watermarking requirements from the major record labels.

His 'arguments' are unconvincing - to say the least.......

 

[JamminVMI]

That is a milinary secret.

Groan. But your vocab is solid.

 

[JamminVMI]

Same HAT that I'm using with my Pi 3B+ and DietPi OS as a Roon enpoint. Gonna try using PicorePlayer pretty soon. It's the bee's knees according to some in this fine forum.

I like both PiCoRe and the Hifiberry Digi Pro + (gotta grab the Digi2 Pro to see/hear if there’s an appreciable difference)

 

[Ripper2860]

Not sure if it's DietPi, or my older Hifiberry Digi Pro HAT, but my PC connected via USB -> Unison BF2 is notably better than my RPi to BF2 via coax S/PDIF. Unison sounds more open and airy with a clearer top-end and wider soundstage. Makes S/PDIF sound a bit congested and muddy. I guess Mike wasn't BS'ing about the virtues of Unison. I'll try piCorePlayer this weekend and see if there's a diff.

I suspect I'll end up with a Pi 4 and USB connection to BF2/Unison. The Pi 3B+ and S/PDIF HAT is just for fun and education at this point.

 

[Roy G. Biv]

I'm not an Apple music user so have no dog in this fight. Putting aside they typos, spelling and atrocious English (or even American), how can one know what is 'bit perfect' and what is not? And the author seems to believe that any encoding scheme is verboten, lossless or not, how does he imaging his perfect bits get form a to be to his lugoles?

What? "mQa" doesn't sit right with you?
"The albums playback as mQa on a DAC in my system that is a full mQa decoder."
"I set a baseline by playing my own local copy of the albums and make sure the HDCD indicator illuminates."
"Apple Music's lossless audio that I tested was 16 bit / 44.1 kHa"
" I connected the newest version of the Apple Camera Connection Kit to the iPhone, so I could attach a USB Audi interface"
"How did I find the same (sample) rate? Fortunately, the Apple Music app on iOS has auto sample rate switching, which enabled me to get the rate, then sixth (switch) back to my Mac to run the tests."

I agree that the article seems like it was published without even a cursory edit. Poor grammar notwithstanding, I'd prefer a more scientific approach than "the indicator didn't light up."

Having said that, the author conceptually agrees with several other online authors who have discovered that Apple's foray into lossless/HD music is, at best, half-baked.

I'm a Mac user but not an Apple Music user and nothing I've read makes me want to go back to iTunes/Music/Apple Music.

Now, what the heck does "his lugoles" mean?

edit: I get that nobody likes a grammar nazi, but the referenced article was pretty egregious for an established author.

 

[RickB]

His 'arguments' are unconvincing - to say the least.......

As I don't have firsthand knowledge of his methodology (I don't even know what HDCD is.), I can't really comment. But I do know he is a reputable person from what I've seen so far.

 

[tincanear]

What? "mQa" doesn't sit right with you?
"The albums playback as mQa on a DAC in my system that is a full mQa decoder."
"I set a baseline by playing my own local copy of the albums and make sure the HDCD indicator illuminates."
"Apple Music's lossless audio that I tested was 16 bit / 44.1 kHa"
" I connected the newest version of the Apple Camera Connection Kit to the iPhone, so I could attach a USB Audi interface"

I agree that the article seems like it was published without even a cursory edit. Poor grammar notwithstanding, I'd prefer a more scientific approach than "the indicator didn't light up."

Having said that, the author conceptually agrees with several other online authors who have discovered that Apple's foray into lossless/HD music is, at best, half-baked.

I'm a Mac user but not an Apple Music user and nothing I've read makes me want to go back to iTunes/Music/Apple Music.

Now, what the heck does "his lugoles" mean?

IIRC, HDCD was an encoding method to squeeze 20 bits of dynamic range into a 16 bit format, using a noise dithering and encoding /decoding process-- in other words, not a lossless process. So the author's baseline was itself not accurate.

 

[Plautus001]

As I don't have firsthand knowledge of his methodology (I don't even know what HDCD is.), I can't really comment. But I do know he is a reputable person from what I've seen so far.

HDCD

We used to sell Parasound DACs with HDCD.

For a time from 1995-200? DACs and HDCD were a thing.

Kenwood even added HDCD to their receivers.

In my experience, they did seem to have more resolution and "fullness" than a regular CD.

The positive is many artists used the format for the same price as a "regular" CD such as Mark Knopfler, Madonna, and others I can't remember.
HDCD encoded Compact Discs.

 

[Ableza]

Now, what the heck does "his lugoles" mean?

I think that's a Juggalo term.

 

[Roy G. Biv]

I think that's a Juggalo term.

A close friend is known for saying "there are no certainties in life."
He's wrong.
I'm certain that @golfbravobravo wasn't referring to juggalos. (I wonder how many forum members just googled 'juggalo')

 

[Balthazar B]

I think that's a Juggalo term.

Juggalo beauty contests are something else...

 

[Balthazar B]

Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res Mess

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/bits-and-bytes/apple-musics-lossless-and-hi-res-mess-r1022/

And there's this:

 

[Ableza]

A close friend is known for saying "there are no certainties in life."
He's wrong.
I'm certain that @golfbravobravo wasn't referring to juggalos. (I wonder how many forum members just googled 'juggalo')

We don't know what he might do in the privacy of his own home.

 

[Roy G. Biv]

True. Privacy is highly underrated.

 

[macdonjh]

Some of us have taken this "HAT" thing way too far.....

Bottom board has a 180Gbyte SSD drive, the board also converts that to a USB3 interface.
Next up is an R-Pi 4 w/4Gbytes of RAM. The Pi's bios is configured to boot off of the USB I/F first, and look for a microSD card if no bootable device is found on the USB I/F.
Then there's an obligatory fan. I put a heatsink on the SoC/CPU, the fan keeps everything under 35C. It's quiet, too.
And on top of the stack is a DC UPS card. Full power supply with two Li-ion cells. Enough juice to run for about 8 hours with this configuration.

This Frankenstein stack normally has a pair of 4Gbyte hard drives plugged in and serves as my audio media server running Logitech's Squeezebox server on top of the Moode Linux build. Most of what I wanted was baked into Moode, I added the Squeezebox server on top, a shell script to spin down the drives when not in use and a shell script run as a cron job using rsync to keep the main and backup drives in sync. It serves music to a pair of Squeezebox 3 endpoints, S/PDIF out into a Bifrost 2 and a Modi multibit. And doubles as a file server so I have backups of my wife's photography and our home office stuff. With the drives spun down, it draws about 5 watts.

All you need is a case machined from billet aluminum (be sure to buy the "military aircraft" grade) held together by 35 #4 screws (Torx head to keep prying fingers out) and you have an $8000 component.