![]() It sounds fantastic and I have no intention of changing any components for the foreseeable. But I can hear more realism in vocals and pick out more detail with AM on this one, no matter what processing is going on.įor me, my system is plenty good enough. I appreciate that what sounds good is often personal preference. But at the end of the day what reaches our ears is most important. is appreciated and I have enjoyed the various insights. lossy, AAC/ALAC, compression, up/down sampling, lossless or lossy AirPlay etc. If you listen to a “high resolution” track on Apple Music or elsewhere which is > 44.1 then it gets resampled down to 16/44.1 or 16/48 in which case Airplay becomes “lossy”.Īll the opinions and information about bit rates, lossless vs. For the vast majority of audio content which is “CD quality” 16/44.1 this will be lossless. This is not a “lossless” process unless the thing you’re streaming is already 16/44.1 or 16/48 and matches the destination. If you use Airplay all sources are up / downsampled to one of these 2 rates depending on the endpoint you’re sending to. I won’t go into it here.Īirplay supports 2 formats: 16/44.1 and 16/48. But the input bitstream resolution (44.1 for example) is still the same input and output. ![]() The other benefit is that most containers allow for nice things like metadata to be added to the file. The PCM input bitstream matches the output bitstream in this case because it’s lossless. Those extra 1s and 0s (think replacing 100 0’s of silence with something like 0x100) are then restored when you decompress the file (it can read 0x100 and just put back the 100 0’s). A lossless CODEC simply reduces the number of 1s and 0s that need to be stored. Now, if you have a PCM bitstream and you want to compress it in a lossless way you simply compress the bits much like a zip file. The difference between the two is in what MP3 threw away as part of the COdeing process. It’s just the PCM input is not the PCM output even if they are both 44.1. When you “decompress”, or DECOde, the MP3 you decode it back to 44.1 so the DAC can understand it. Once that stuff is thrown away you are left a MP3 container holding the MP3 “compressed”, or COded, audio. What it decides to throw away is complicated so I’ll skip that part. This is the “lossy” part of MP3 being a lossy CODEC. Well… Something like MP3 takes a PCM bitstream and starts throwing things away to make that bitstream smaller. ![]() OK… so what does this mean for CODECs and containers? Some DACs only support 44.1 and some support only 48. All audio must be a multiple of one of those resolutions for a DAC that supports both. Those limited resolutions are 44.1 and 48. DACs are hardware “clocked” and therefore can only accept a limited number of resolutions. This is confusing as you start to look into the world of containers and CODECs.Ī DAC must be presented with a bitstream it understands. Lossy format but streamed at a bit-depth/rate of 16/44.1?
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