Will lossless audio work via Airplay 2 and my receiver?

psideras wrote:

Suddenly today I tried playback streaming Apple Music lossless with AirPlay from iPad to my receiver (AirPlay 1) and the “lossless” icon stayed on!

Be aware that it is not clear that the icon on means that you are getting lossless.

I agree it’s confusing. I tried this experiment. Setup was AirPod Pro Max wireless connection to current iPad Pro. Click settings, music, audio quality. Turn off lossless audio. Open Apple Music app. Play a lossless song. No lossless logo. Close Music App. Back to setup and turn lossless audio back on. Open music app and play the same song. Logo is back. Clicking on the logo shows data rate. Given this setup the logo seems to working fine.

I have a Yamaha receiver RXV4A with the Music Cast app. They state it supports hi res streaming? I know it supports AP1 &2. So the way I understand it is, through airplay it will not be lossless. If I want lossless I need to connect my iPad via USB ? This seems more complicated than it needs to be. Thanks.

According to the current Apple Music AirPlay behavior, being Apple TV 3rd generation an AirPlay 1 device, you'll get a lossless ALAC 44.1 kHz stream.

The output won't be bit perfect, though, due to the already mentioned upsampling, which is an alteration. Some purists would even argue that the upsampling process means losing the "losslessness"...

Thanks for your documentation. It sounds like all of your testing was done streaming through Apple Music? I've heard that local lossless tracks will always be played as lossless on all Apple Music apps: macOS, iOS, iPadOS. Not sure if there is a difference here between a track downloaded from Apple Music vs. a locally ripped lossless track.

Hopefully this all get's sorted out when HomePod gets lossless, as HomePod uses Airplay.

Interesting, I don't have Apple TV but it sounds like the old Airport Express option. I thought I read that local files on iPad/iPhone come through as lossless over Airplay—it's only the streaming function that forces lossy AAC over Airplay (or without Apple TV as in your setup.) More searching researching to do...

Out of all of these replies, has anyone actually checked the input stream reported by the receiver? I know DENON has this capability, and I’m sure others do as well. I’ll check mine later when I’m streaming lossless tracks via AirPlay 2. In any case, Apple needs to sort this out. It’s really unusual for them to launch a new feature with so much inconsistency and lack of transparency around how it works.

Just checked Apple lossless vs. Deezer HIFI. Setup: iPad Pro>Airplay2 LG TV>Optical Rotel 1570 amp>Dynaudio speakers

To my ears Apple Music sounded noticeably inferior to Deezer. Much less volume, image and sparkle. It actually sounded muffled and dull without even comparison with Deezer. The moment I turned it on I didn’t like it. Switching to Deezer was a bliss to my ears. The thing is that sound degradation on Apple Music is so great that it just cannot be explained by aac and flac difference. It was much bigger than that.

Dont know what to think. I was a bit shocked by the results. Was going to switch to AM from Deezer cause it’s much cheaper and a bit more convenient since I’m on App,e ecosystem.

Have you compared the exact same songs at the same quality? I know it seems like an obvious question, but comparing different songs at different qualities is apples to oranges comparison. One thing I did notice about Apple Music content are absolute volume differences between songs, even from the same album sometimes. What I mean by this is that some songs play very quiet, and others play very loud. This can be so prominent and problematic sometimes that I actually have to physically adjust volume by quite a bit. I have not had this type of experience with Tidal or with Spotify. (Lossless on Tidal at least). I do not use volume normalization anywhere.

@Marco K.,

I'm 4 meters away from my hi-fi system, so I think it makes more sense to stream the music wirelessly.

"AirPlay audio means 16/44.1 kHz", so it is meaningless to set my iPad Wi-Fi Streaming audio quality as hi-rez lossless, right?

I use NAD M12 as my streamer, and iPad Air 4 as source. How would you do in order to listen to hi-rez Apple Music on this setting? Much appreciate.

https://nadelectronics.com/product/m12-digital-preamp-dac/

I see nothing here about AirPlay.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183

However, this article on 9-5 Mac indicates AirPlay to Apple Homepods is supported.

ios-14-6-airplay-lossless-homepod

But the reality is that the vast majority of people can no distinguish between lossy audio and lossless audio. That's how good the lossless algorithms are.

Apple's Eddie Cue:

The reality of lossless is: if you take 100 people and you take a stereo song in lossless and you take a song that’s been in Apple Music that’s compressed, I don’t know if it’s 99 or 98 can’t tell the difference.” Cue revealed that he has regularly done blind tests with the Apple Music team, and they confirm how rare it is for anyone to be able to consistently recognize lossless audio. “You can tell somebody, ‘Oh, you’re listening to a lossless [song],’ and they tell you, ‘Oh, wow. That sounds incredible.’ They’re just saying it because you told them it’s lossless and it sounds like the right thing to say, but you just can’t tell.”

> Speaking of hi-res, currently, the only way to achieve it with an iPad is with a USB adapter coupled with a USB DAC.

That's what I have done with my iPhone. I connected my iPhone 11 Pro to a Belkin Lightning Audio + Charge RockStar™ adapter. One of the Lightning ports connects to power, and the other port to an Apple Lightning to USB Camera Adapter, then to the DAC. It looks terrible, but unless the DAC can supply power to the iPad or iPhone, this is what I need.

Thanks! One more question... When using the Idagio app on my iPhone or iPad, set to lossless FLAC 16-bit / 44.1 kHz streaming quality, and sending it over AirPlay2 via wifi to my Airport Express, which is connected via an optical cable to my receiver, my receiver shows the input as 44.1 kHz. So is that FLAC audio stream from Idagio being passed thru all the way to my receiver untouched, without my iPhone or Airport Express doing any conversion? And the receiver's DAC is then decoding the FLAC stream?

Assuming the Idagio app works correctly (not like the current Music app), yes, the DAC will receive an unaltered FLAC stream from your iPhone/iPad.

AirportExpress is capable of lossless streaming up to 44.1 kHz via AirPlay 2.

I don’t understand why from my iPad I would have cruddy AAC 256 yet from my MacBook I would get ALAC. I don’t want to be running my MacBook all the time. If Apple can’t fix this, I’m going back to Tidal.