In a way, it won’t feel very good when I’m listening to something that’s not Dolby Atmos because it’s so good. It’s going to be the way I listen to music in my house. It’s going to be the way I listen to music immediately with my AirPods. It’s the way I want to listen to music when I’m in my car. “I think this is going to take over everything.
“When I look at Dolby Atmos, I think it’s going to do for music what HD did for television,” Cue said in the Billboard interview. If you go by the message that Cue and Apple are pushing, the Dolby Atmos-powered spatial audio feature is where the true breakthrough is. That sounds incredible.’ They’re just saying it because you told them it’s lossless and it sounds like the right thing to say, but you just can’t tell.” “You can tell somebody, ‘Oh, you’re listening to a lossless ,’ and they tell you, ‘Oh, wow. “The reality of lossless is: if you take 100 people and you take a stereo song in lossless and you take a song that’s been in Apple Music that’s compressed, I don’t know if it’s 99 or 98 can’t tell the difference.” Cue revealed that he has regularly done blind tests with the Apple Music team, and they confirm how rare it is for anyone to be able to consistently recognize lossless audio. He did acknowledge that the higher-bit rate tracks might matter to music lovers with particularly sharp hearing or premium audio equipment, but he was also direct about how niche that group is. Cue firmly stands on the side of the crowd that argues most people can’t hear any difference between CD-quality or hi-res tracks and the AAC or MP3 files that’ve been filling their ears for so long now. “There’s no question it’s not going to be lossless,” he said when asked what technologies will bring about the “next-gen” of music streaming. He didn’t mince words when he told Billboard that the sudden proliferation of lossless audio isn’t going to significantly evolve or change how we listen to music. It feels like the company is really only excited about one of them, though, and it’s not the latter.Įddy Cue is Apple’s senior vice president of services and the person who oversees Apple Music. Late on Monday night, Apple flipped the switch on two new features for its Apple Music subscription service: immersive Dolby Atmos spatial audio and lossless-quality streaming.