We’ve come to expect people to say stupid things. It’s a daily occurrence if you watch the news, at least here in the US.
But I am continually amazed to see writers on tech, like Jason Cross, Staff Writer at Macworld, peddle in uninformed, conspiracy theory nonsense which he does to the nth degree in, Nobody needs HiFi Apple Music+: Lossless, high-fidelity music is useless marketing snake oil, and always has been.
Here’s Jason:
Almost nobody can hear the difference
There’s a good reason for that. Modern “lossy” music compression is really good at getting rid of only the audio data you can’t really hear anyway. The fact is, when put to the test most people can’t tell the difference between “lossless” audio and well-encoded lossy” audio (say, 256kbits per second AAC, which is what Apple Music currently streams).
Of course, Jason provides no evidence for this claim, not a single link, not a single fact. Yet he does call for, wait for it, blind tests to prove that the stuff Jason owns is just as good, if not better than, the more expensive stuff less informed people buy. Sigh.
When we know we’re listening to fancy audio, we can convince ourselves that it sounds better. Tell a listener they’re about to hear a $10,000 amplifier and they’ll gush about its quality, too. When we try a blind test, we see that the emperor has no clothes.
When we read things like “fancy audio”, “blind test”, “gush”, and “the emperor has no clothes”, we know a few things — the writer doesn’t mind using hackneyed cliches, the writer feels superior, and the writer lacks experience. It’s the old — I’m not really interested in this stuff, so no one else should be — syndrome.
The article never mentions the difference between CD-quality and hi-res, nor does it point out that Spotify HiFi will only offer CD-quality, not hi-res, and initial reports on Apple HiFi suggests the same. [footnote 1] The author also fails to explain why he chose to use the meaningless term “high fidelity music” in the article’s tagline (think clickbait).
Music lovers have been ripping CDs in lossless formats like FLAC for ages. Apple even has its own, ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), which is now open-source and royalty-free. Despite these formats being available for a very long time, they never really became mainstream.
In any event, Jason has made the seriously silly mistake of lumping CD-quality in with high-res, thereby making the wild claim that CDs are “snake oil”. Nifty! By the way, the CD format became mainstream, last I checked.
Congratulations to Macworld for stooping to Fox News quality journalism.
- 9to5Google is now reporting that Apple may also include hi-res titles in their HiFi service. This makes perfect sense seeing as Apple has been asking for 24-bit/96kHz “Masters” as part of their “Mastered for iTunes” program, which is now called “Apple Digital Masters“, for years.