Illustrative example: the utopian amplifier is idealistically referred to as a 'strait wire with gain' - meaning it can amplify the signal without adding/subtracting anything or coloring the sound at all. The goal of high-end audio is generally to faithfully reproduce the original audio performance as much as possible, which requires significant care at every step in the chain.However, digital signals don't suffer from such problems and can be passed through perfectly bit-for-bit. This is a good thing, because general purpose computers are not designed for best audio performance and tend to be extremely noisy and hostile environments for analog signals, undoing any benefit of high-resolution audio. Use of these higher bitrates requires an external DAC to decode the digital audio and convert it to an analog signal before sending it to your amplifier -> speakers/headphones.Apple is a high-end luxury brand and has recognized that there is strong enough demand for high-resolution audio amongst it's customer base - or else why both offering high-resolution audio above 48kHz at all?.It has been known for a while that higher bitrate/bitdepth audio - if recorded and engineered properly - has the capability to sound noticeably better than music encoded at the traditional RedBook CD standard of 44.1kHz/16-bits when played back on appropriately capable equipment.Supporting high-resolution lossless audio but not providing an option to ensure the digital output matches what was downloaded without modification is a huge miss by Apple and I truly can't understand why they would do this! There are third party apps for purchase that will do this for you (ensure the output format matches the audio file being played to ensure the signal is passed through unadulterated), but this shouldn't be necessary! This is the only way to ensure that the digital audio signal isn't modified by your Mac before being passed to your DAC! Not exactly a great user experience. Since the bitrate for lossless music could be any of (all in kHz): 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192 but the digital audio output format remains fixed, one must click on the lossless logo to check which format is being used, then go into the separate Audio MIDI Setup app and set the matching output format - for *every* song/album that I play on Apple Music. I hope I just haven't found the setting for this or it's coming soon? I'm super happy that Apple Music finally supports lossless audio, but the lack of a 'bit-perfect' digital passthrough option is a critical gap that prevents me - and likely most folks who care enough about audio quality to bother with high-resolution lossless audio via external DAC - from adopting it as my primary source of audio enjoyment.
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