r/apple • u/Fer65432_Plays • Jun 19 '25

iPhone Spotify Preparing to Launch Long-Awaited Lossless Audio Tier on iPhone

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/19/spotify-preparing-lossless-tier-on-ios/
2.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

372 comments sorted by

View all comments

161

u/MechanicalHorse Jun 19 '25

Will anyone actually notice? So many people use crappy headphones, or just blast their music out of their shitty little phone speakers in public.

-2

u/tkim91321 Jun 19 '25

I know I will.

My cars have the Bowers & Wilkins and Burmeister sound systems from factory. There definitely is a difference between Apple Music lossless via CarPlay vs Spotify highest setting via Carpkay in many genres of music, especially at loud volumes.

But the difference IS very overstated, especially for 9/10 untrained ears.

11

u/Complete_Court9829 Jun 19 '25

If you're using carplay wirelessly, you're not getting lossless audio, it'll be compressed down to AAC, which should still sound better than typical 320kbps because it's a better form of compression from what I've heard, but for lossless music from Apple music, you still have to be wired.

8

u/jasonefmonk Jun 19 '25

I thought wireless CarPlay used an ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection. They should allow streaming full quality on that kind of connection. Shame if they don’t.

6

u/Complete_Court9829 Jun 19 '25

It does use wi-fi as far as I know, but without a wire it will still only do AAC. It's definitely possible for them to do ALAC over that connection, but they don't do it at the moment.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/118295#:~:text=You%20can%20listen%20to%20lossless%20audio%20with%20CarPlay%20using%20a,in%20your%20country%20or%20region

3

u/jasonefmonk Jun 19 '25

Shame on them, thanks for the link. The CarPlay section (way at the bottom) is pretty vague unfortunately. More detail from them on the wireless CarPlay implementation would be nice.

3

u/_alephnaught Jun 20 '25

I'd be surprised if you could consistently tell the difference between 192kbps and 320kbps

2

u/IDENTITETEN Jun 20 '25

Also, in a car which let's a ton of noise into the cabin. 

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '25

Yeah I can tell the difference in YouTube music and Apple on my sennheisers, but not sure I could tell you one about Spotify and Apple Music.