High-resolution audio is a touchy topic. Audiophiles swear they can hear its nuances. Apple’s never been shy about selling and streaming good-enough audio on iTunes and Apple Music.
The latest Apple rumor claims Apple is working on high-resolution music streaming at up to 96kHz/24-bit quality, according to a report from Japanese Apple blog Macotara, which has a history of hits and misses predicting unannounced Apple news. Apple Music currently streams at 256kbps, which isn’t even CD-quality (44.1kHz/16-bit).
Would Apple really introduce high-res audio streaming in 2016 as the rumor suggests?
That’s up for healthy debate. Following the launch of the iPhone 6 last year, Mashable discovered the smartphone — in theory — had the hardware capable of playing high-res audio possibly up to 96kHz/24-bit when piped through the Lightning port, but Apple had intentionally limited its capabilities closer to CD-quality.
Enabling high-res audio would require Apple to re-encode the 30-million plus songs for Apple Music.
Audiophiles like Neil Young would be vindicated if Apple ever offered high-res audio.
Skeptics have turned up, though. Writing on his blog, Kirk McElhearn calls bullshit on Apple doing high-res audio, insisting Apple would have planned ahead with the new Apple TV if the news was authentic:
That device only handles audio at 16 bits and up to 48 KHz. So if Apple were planning to start dealing in high-resolution audio (generally considered to have a bit depth of 24 bits, and sample rates higher than 48 KHz), you’d have thought this device would be able to handle such audio.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eventually does bring high-resolution audio to the iTunes Store and to Apple Music, but the only way they can do this is if the data doesn’t count against users’ mobile data caps (or static caps too, for those people who don’t have unlimited internet access).
Still, Apple doesn’t always follow reasonable logic. If it did, the Apple TV would also support 4K video streaming because the iPhone 6S/6S Plus can record in 4K resolution.
The high-res audio rumor follows an earlier rumor that suggested Apple could kill off the 3.5mm headphone jack in favor of outputting audio through the Lightning port, which as we said earlier could theoretically support high-res audio. – Mashable
