Apple Music HiFi Tier incoming?

I want be staying so won’t be transferring anything.

Of course they will, part of the plan to sell more hardware in the long run. Apple love an add on dongle.

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This picture shows the real motives for this new service. You have to ask why would they open it up?

Expect updates Airpods to make more of your money, additional dongles and of course a whole new proprietary BT codec. We all love a proprietary format.

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They rediscovered the music hardware I guess

Remember the days of iPod

Beats was a mistake

Not sure; they only produce a few mass-market or essential connectors/cables themselves.
For more niche things (and a hires capable USB out, with or without DAC will be a niche thing compared to the nice, tres chic commodity products they have) they will leave to other suppliers, content with lower margins, lower volumes, etc. pp.
They are very selective as well, what they sell in their own stores (quality, volumes, …) and what they leave to other stores. (They love margin and efficient supply chains.)
Maybe they leave the HiRes „niche“ to some trusted HW suppliers. (Who now have more reason to produce something „for HiRes Apple users“. With extra style and ease of use and a somewhat higher margin than mass-market products because it’s „for Apple“.)

For 9x% of users, this will be either marketing only (good they have it, others don’t offer something more) or a placebo effect, given people are fully content on playing (not only background) music on equipment, where Sonos and HomePods are the deluxe products.
Appel often takes the margin on those 9x% and leaves the rest to others. (Unless they need an own product for policy/strategy reasons (filling a strategic gap, showing off technology leadership, attack other markets, …), like the Mac Pro. That must have cost a lot to develop and volume will be low.)

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If they see hi res or any other format as a credible selling story they might well go into it

They must be happy with airpods

They invested big time on Beats but could not build on it

Maybe all lossles / hires/ 3D sound will generate new line of products, it is a nice story to sell

Remember whenever Apple gets in 20$ headphone guys start to spend 250$ on shiny new apple ones

So maybe we will see many people with new amp/dacs

With the announcement by Apple in the last couple of days of lossless in June, I wonder whether Naim’s streaming software will eventually support the new format natively. As a long term Apple aficionado I would be interested in this (although I curently use Tidal & Qobuz) but am not sure that via Airplay from an iOS device the quality will be maintained/good enough. Also streaming via a phone seems to greatly impinge on battery life - which is not at all ideal. Any thoughts?

This is where I become a little baffled with all these new ways to stream. In my mind, streaming using my ND5XS2 should produce the best sound from my Core. Next best would be Tidal directly from within the Naim App. Chrome cast and Airplay seem like they would be the last thing I would want to use, sound wise…but I could be completely wrong about this.:man_shrugging:

Hi Powderfinger, and welcome to the Forums!

Do a search and you can see several threads already on subject.

In short - that ball is in Apple’s court!

You don’t spend £ xxxx/x on a Naim system to feed it airplay from your phone. If you do get your priorities straight. As that’s the only way you’ll get Apple music unless you have a DAC v1 or some Other USb DAC or a Sonos Connect . Sort of defeats the source is first argument you all hold on to.

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So 16/44 sent to your Naim streamer via AirPlay is less worthy than 16/44 sent to your Naim via Qobuz???

Or, if Apple extend the capability of AirPlay to hi res, somehow they are poorer quality bits than those from Qobuz?

With live lyrics, playlist sharing and recommendations from Apple Music they will give the Roon experience a run for its money.

I appreciate not everyone uses Apple kit, but I fail to see why feeding a Naim streamer via AirPlay is such a low form of music enjoyment.

Maybe it’s just cool to be anti Apple… :yawning_face:

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Airplay currently does some weird conversion and isn’t true 16/44 CD quality. You can clearly here the difference from Tidal amd Qobuz. But, apparently, it has the capability if the Apple software is updated to enable proper CD quality and maybe hi-res (up to a certain limit believe?).

Because for the most part it doesnt sound as good. It is less worthy due to the nature of how airplay works. It relies on two clocks one from the sender in this case your phone to push and one from the receiver in this case your expensive Naim streamer to pull. Which clock is right as they are likely to have drift between them. So timing accuracy is affected so your DAC side clock has to deal with an manipulate it to the correct frequency either by speed up or slow down the clock , drop or stuff samples from the audio stream or resample the audio frequency to the exact frequency it requires so in this case 44.1 to fix it. UPnP, RAAT and Open home use one clock the one at the streamer or DAC to determine the rate music is pulled and transferred and the server just pushes it. All this can and does affect the sq. But you only need ot hear airplay to know it’s doesn’t sound as good. If it did then no one would be wanting integrated services or bother with the Naim app .

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question not answered by Apple. If the brand’s headphones can’t pick up the HIFI, who will? Knowing that Airplay is limited to 16-48. It’s the same issue with Amazon HD.

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It is not always that simple. Sorry to say. I am sure many will disagree with me on this. I used to be of the same mindset as yourself. That is until I built my current speakers. These speakers have very low distortion and are very dynamic. They are incredibly smooth and have very good drivers with low cone breakups and time alignment. This all matters sometimes more than purely source alone. I would place a large wager that most listeners would take my Atom system playing only from Apple Music vs the Proac tab 10 playing high res. Especially when played at low volume or high volume. If you enjoy what comes out of the speakers then it doesn’t matter what you play from. Having the options is great. I use high res from a hard drive, CD input, tv, airplay. It all sounds great. Not to even mention the variance in production quality of music.

The original Beats Music service was really good with the excellent curated lists for different niche styles - and they were done by people who knew their stuff - some are still there in Apple Music but hard to find and without the curators notes.

And the old Beats Dr Dre Studio headphones are still my favorite when watching movies on the iPad.

This is why I like Roon. Nothing is streaming from my phone or iPad. It’s streaming from the Roon server running on a NUC, connected to my NDX2 via ethernet. The phone or iPad connects to the Roon server and only acts as a controller. I doubt I’d even be tempted by AM unless they can enable Roon integration.

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Many, many years ago when the little AppleTV2 was released it was fun to play with it and airplay. And with a python-script you could use airplay to request that little AppleTV2 to pull data directly off any HLS or HTTP-server and play any data it would recognize. By just handing a URL over to the AppleTV-device. I played music from our internal HTTP-servers this way.

So one guess is they have the ALAC-files on Apple Music servers saving them via HLS-protocol. Airplay is not very suitable for internet.

My point is that an ios device shouldn’t be a media server for streaming audio to a Naim device. It should only be the controller.

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Precisely. And even why have Roon in the chain and play Apple Music directly from the internet to your hi-fi system. The phone or iPad is just a controller. Like Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect.

Consumers will want the flexibility to have access to high resolution music anywhere - home, car, office, walking etc.

I think eventually in that is where we will all end up. It may take a few years.