Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio in Apple Music
I’m not an audiophile, but most people who claim to be are full of shit anyway, so. Long story short: Spatial Audio is incredible. Lossless is completely unnoticeable.
Apple has really hyped up this announcement, and I don’t think the hype is unwarranted. Everyone I’ve had try listening to a song in Spatial Audio has been thoroughly impressed by it. It might take a little getting used to, but I think this really could be the next big step for audio quality that we’ll point to decades from now as a turning point. It doesn’t necessarily improve every song, but it doesn’t really make any song worse. Particularly with older music, there are tradeoffs when listening to them in the Spatial Audio format, but I think it’s pretty much a wash. But with newer songs that were mastered specifically for this format, it’s far more immersive and enjoyable than stereo. When Spatial Audio doesn’t work well with a song, it’s fine, but when it does work well with a song, it’s incredible. If your ears are having trouble noticing the difference, there’s a place in settings where you can toggle between a Spatial Audio and stereo version of a sample track that really allows you to hear the difference and know what to listen for.
Specifically, Spatial Audio sounds like you’re situated in the middle of the music. Imagine being in a circular room with your favorite artist or band. It’s different depending on how each individual song is mixed, but for example, you could be listening to the artist’s voice front and center, while there’s a guitar off to the right a bit, some drums behind you and to the left, etc.
With AirPods Pro and AirPods Max, this effect gets even better, because they further amplify Spatial Audio with the addition of Dynamic Head Tracking. This feature uses the motion sensors in the headphones to follow your head and move the sound around you based on the position of the headphones in 3D space. For example, if the artist’s voice is coming from right in front of you, and you turn your head to the right, you’ll hear the voice in your left ear, as if it’s originating from the same point in space. When this works well, it makes you forget you have anything in your ears (and it makes the people in the coffee shop next to you wonder why you keep turning your head so far in their direction). It’s seriously uncanny, it’s as is if the music was made for you in that moment. In my testing, it seems like this is already working with a lot of the songs that are available in Dolby Atmos but not with all of them (I guess it’s possible that my ears just suck, but I don’t think so). There’s no rhyme or reason to when it seems to work and there’s no way to know for sure whether Dynamic Head Tracking is active, but the feature is still in beta testing so hopefully this is just a bug and it’ll be more consistent by the time the feature rolls out. In any case, this is another great feature for AirPods Pro. I could never recommend AirPods Max to anybody, but I can’t say enough good things about AirPods Pro. I wrote a glowing review when they first came out, and Apple has continued to add features like Dynamic Head Tracking and the just-announced Conversation boost that make them an even better value.
It has to be said, though, that there is a pretty big downside to Spatial Audio and lossless. Songs downloaded in Dolby Atmos or lossless take a TON of storage. I downloaded about four albums to test the feature out, a total of about 75 songs, and it took 2.6 GIGABYTES of space. If you like music, you should probably consider doubling up on your iPhone storage next time you upgrade.
In addition to being a storage hog, these features highlight another failing of the music app’s design. It’s always unclear what format any particular song is downloaded in, and the only way to change it is to remove and redownload the song after adjusting your preferences in the Settings app. There needs to be a way to adjust the version on a per-song basis. I see no reason why they couldn’t add two or three options to the menu when you long press on a song or album to include options like “Download Dolby Atmos” and “Download Lossless.” And they should have master buttons to convert all songs in your library to the Dolby Atmos or lossless when they become available; it’s not reasonable to expect people to delete and re-download albums as they become available, which has a the potential to mess up their playlists that include any of those songs. I think this is probably something that Apple will work on throughout the summer as iOS 15 matures.
Despite those drawbacks, the bottom line here is that Spatial Audio really does have the potential to revolutionize music, and I’m having a ton of fun with it. Also, if you’ve been considering a new pair of headphones, AirPods Pro are still a terrific buy.