New Apple TV 4K and hi-res lossless

The same is true of iPod Touch (7th gen) and iPhones plugged into an AV receiver or DAC. I have used an iPod and iPhone 14 Pro connected with a Lightening to USB cable directly into a McIntosh MX180 processor. I’ve confirmed both at 24/192. I can use the processor’s remote control to access playlists and such, but it’s kinda clunky. With an iPhone I can use my Apple Watch as a MUCH better remote, but then I lose use of the iPhone, obviously.

The best possible solution would have been the AppleTV. Oh well. Maybe it will be a future product or even a software update.

My remote control is another Mac, a Macbook with screen sharing to the mini. But you can use every device with VNC. You can also use the Apple Remote control for Apple TV. Or a Bluetooth keyboard. But then you have to connect the Mac to a TV or screen to see what happens.

Technical it is also possible to use an iPad with USB C for hi-res. But I find no comfortable solution for remote control. So I use an old Mac Mini with Monterey

I have a spare Mac Mini. Question: can I just replace my AppleTV entirely with the Mac Mini? Will it do all the things? Obviously I can hook it up and see, but if someone knows that would be awesome - especially if I can use the ATV remote.

For Apple Music, yes. But I would not recommend it for TV+ etc. For Apple Music the remote control via screensharing/VNC is OK, but if you want to see stuff on a TV you have to use the TV as the Mac screen. I have an old Mac mini (Mid 2011) and it's slow with Monterey and I didn't try TV+ and use it only for Music, but also if you have a newer mini, I think it's not what you want. The operation is not so comfortable as with Apple TV and it's remote control. Because of this I have both, a mini for music, and TV for video.

Apple should bring hi-res to TV or create something like a iPod Plus. But it is as it is today.

Thank you for such clarity.

I wasted $150 on the new (11/2022) Apple TV after being told it would support the highest resolution (24/192) Apple audio files. Why spend $600+ on a Mac Mini just to play audio files the Apple TV should be able to handle directly? IMO this is a major failure by Apple.

@nitinti - I think if you want to play your own music, you don’t need any Apple software (or hardware). All you need is:

• Your AV receiver, connected to the network
• Some (any) computer on which you have a folder with your music (that can be the Apple Music folder or some other folder), connected to the same network
• Free software: MinimServer, running on the computer that has the file folder
• Free controller software on your iPad or iPhone. This can be Yamaha MusiCast or Denon/Marantz Heos, or mConnect, but there are nicer ones like Linn or Lumin, but for the latter ones, you also need BubbleUPnPServer running next to MinimServer.

All these are free and have a user experience that blows Apple out of the water (unless you are operating your music from the same Apple device where it’s actually stored).

What I am looking for is something like Apple Music on iPhone or iPad, which would play back the songs that I don’t have on my drives, the stuff that’s streaming from outside of the house, directly on the Apple TV. Not the music I already own.

@spawn350

Are you sure you have all done right on AudioMidi Setup? And have the right cable?! I think USB is USB is USB and there is no magic on M1 to cut it. You can also try the Losless Switcher that sets it up automatically for you. https://github.com/vincentneo/LosslessSwitcher Also Apple does not "hate" hi-res. But they don't love it until today.

@nitinti… Incorrect @mention on my side, as I see now on a bigger screen: My comment should have been directed at @spawn350 - who wrote, “don’t buy a Mac Mini for this purpose, unless you have a TON of your own downloaded music”.

What I laid out was what to do if you do have that TON of downloaded music: No need to get an additional computer (Mac Mini), as there are better and simpler options to play your own files: DLNA needs almost no setup at all, it “just plays” and can give you a better user experience, no screen mirroring required.

Of course, if you add the Apple Music streaming subscription to the mix, things change: You need the Apple hardware and the loops and hoops you have gone through to make it work until Apple completes their part.

For me - and that is outside of this entire discussion of the Apple TV 4K 2022 - it looks very different: Most “exploring” of new music currently happens on either Spotify or Amazon music. If I have something that seems worthy of keeping I buy it outright, if it is available as SACD (a lot of the more interesting classical recordings are), or Hi-Res download. Righty now, my Hi-Res music is about 95% DSD files, many of them multichannel.

Apple completing their work on the Hi-Res playback chain probably would make me reconsider an Apple Music subscription, which I tried and liked it when they gave me 6 months trial, but I did not like it enough to pay for the semifinished product we now have.

1. Streaming Subscription

When Amazon implemented Hi-Res for its music subscription, I had considered a switch. But it was even worse than Apple's, at least back then. Absolutely no hardware that can play it. But I don't know how it is today with the new Fire TV Cube. Some hifi manufacturers also wanted to integrate Amazon as well as Qobuz or Tidal e.g.. I'm not up to date with that Amazon stuff. Qobuz and Tidal are more expensive as a subscription than Apple and streaming hardware that can play it is usually more expensive than a Mini.

2. Music Server witch streams.

If you have music files you own by yourself, you can install Plex Media Server on any OS you want and use its client or UPNP. Or you use kodi on linux. There are many solutions and also (expensive) dedicated hardware from hifi manufactures like naim, auralic and more.

3. Spotify has no hi-res until today and when it comes it will cost twice as much as Apple Music

4. Everything is relative

@katsujinken

Thanks for sharing your experience. Which DAC do you use? Has the Denon one built in? Or do you use the internal DACs from iPhone and Firestick? That can make a difference too.

And do you know if Amazon has equal or more hi-res albums on start than Apple?

The Denon AVR has a built in DAC. I don’t rely on the internal DAC of the iPhone or Fire TV Stick because I believe they are limited to 48kHz.

I have found the music library b/w Apple and Amazon to be very good as of late. For the music I listen to I can find the same album/song on either service but I find Apple’s curated playlists to be better than Amazon’s suggested playlists. When I want to just listen to music in the background and don’t want to put too much effort into finding music by artist, I can easily find a good variety of playlists by genre or mood. Apple has a greater variety of playlists to choose from. I also think Apple’s UI is better than Amazon’s.

Very similar situation: I've converted my large SACD collection with an Oppo105 to DSF files (stereo and mchn), plus other terabytes of hires/mchn music in my NAS.

I'd love to play these files through my Anthem 5.1.2 system (Anthem AVM70, Anthem MCA525g2, Rotel RMB1066, Dynaudio speakers). Obviously an ATV would be the easier and less expensive solution, but I'm afraid I'll head to a new Mac Mini with Audirvana Origin.

Has anyone tried outputting DSF multichannel files via Mac Mini HDMI to an external DAC, such as my AVM70?

(in my home office I've a second system with Mac Studio + Audirvana + RME ADI-2 DAC fs + SMSL DA9, and it works beautifully but through USB, not HDMI).

@gmeardi - I know this moves away from the “AppleTV does not do Hi-Res” discussion…

First of all, sounds like a great setup you have there. Definitely dwarfs mine (Marantz AVR with a set of Martin Logan speakers).

DSD is an issue (many can’t do it), and multichannel DSD is another level on top of that. I was going down many different routes, and none of them works, e.g.:

• Digital inputs like coax or optical (TOSlink) don’t have the bandwidth for multichannel (multichannel in Atmos or dts or Dolby Digital is highly compressed).
• A Blu-Ray player like your Oppo: You can use it as a DLNA renderer, it can output DSD over HDMI, in multichannel - but it won’t be gapless.
• DLNA streaming over the network to a DLNA-capable receiver (like mine) It works, it’s gapless, but there is no receiver that does multichannel over DLNA.
• There is not really any device (other than the Blu-Ray players) that I could find that would output multichannel DSD over HDMI.

The reason for the DSD-over-HDMI problem is that the audio signals coming over HDMI must apparently be added into a video signal on the same data feed (which the Blu-Ray players can do, they are e.g. sending the cover art and the track name, and accompany the still image with some music). For a computer solution, this means: You would need something that is capable of adding a DSD signal into the video feed - and that now makes it a graphics card problem, not a software problem. A Mac Mini won’t be able to do that.

I spent many (too many) hours on this and ended up with the following setup, which works perfectly, and even more important: Reliably.

• On my NAS (which holds the DSD files), I am running MinimServer - which is probably the best and most rock-solid server you can get, and it’s free. It can stream multichannel DSD without problems, over DLNA and allows gapless playback.
• I bought a mini PC (yes, gasp, blasphemy…) for about $200 (“Mele Quieter 3Q”) on Amazon. This is a fanless device with relatively low power consumption (~4 Watt idle) which I have running all the time. It’s like an appliance…
• On the PC, I installed JRiver MediaCenter ($60 for a perpetual license) - and I only use the renderer (“Player”) part of it. JRiver is configured to convert the multichannel DSD files into 24-bit PCM with 176 KHz sampling rate and 5.1 channels - and sends that over HDMI to my receiver.

Losing the DSD quality before hitting the receiver was not an issue for me - since any digital processing (e.g. room correction) would convert to PCM anyway before sending the signal to the built-in DAC of the receiver.

Finally I have a solution that plays multichannel music over the network, at high quality, and including perfectly gapless playback.

With your setup, @gmeardi, the solution mighty be slightly different, and depends on the capabilities of the AVM 70.

I am not sure if you can stream “raw” multichannel DSD or PCM files easily over the network port into the device, or if HDMI is your only way to get these files playing. If it’s HMDI:

• If the AVM 70 is capable of “DoP” the solution I am using could bring the DSD signal directly into the AVM 70. JRiver Media Center can output DoP and the mini-PC can add that to the video signal.

DoP: “DSD over PCM”. A DSD stream is packaged into a PCM stream (without changing any of the DSD properties). Think of it as transport packaging. The PCM stream then can be added (by the graphics card of the computer) to the HDMI stream that you are sending to your AV processor. The processor unpacks the PCM (DoP) signal and gets the DSD signal back, for further processing or sending to a DSD-capable DAC. No quality loss involved.

• If the AVM 70 cannot do DoP: Since you can’t do DSD over HDMI from a computer, the conversion to PCM (for DSD files, use 176 KHz) is probably the only way.

In my setup, I am using a mini-PC - I’m just cheap like that. Of course, you also could use a Mac Mini if you want to employ it for other purposes, like streaming Apple Music Hi-Res audio. You’d still send a PCM signal to your DAC though.

P.S: I started out using freeware Foobar2000, which exists only for Windows, as my renderer/player on the PC, but it did not do gapless with DSD files. It had an audible ‘plop’ between tracks - and that’s why I moved to Jriver MediaCenter instead.

@gmeardi, @BitzgiSF

I've also read that there is a plugin for "kodi" mediaplayer software the can play DSD multichannel. - But IMHO DSD is a very special theme away from normal hi-res streaming on Apple Music or amazon unlimited or Qobuz.

@ntinti - You are right, DSD is a separate subject altogether.

Thank you for pointing me to Dune HD. In all my research, I did not stumble over them, so I had to take a look. They seem to make interesting devices, but geared more towards video. On the audio front, in the end, they do things similar to my solution, for similar or more money:

They don’t do direct DSD over HDMI: In Dune’s own words, “Multichannel DSD files can be output to HDMI as high quality multichannel PCM (up to 176.4 KHz)”. That’s the same quality I am getting right now, which is good enough (for me).

But - killer criterion: None of their devices does gapless playback. If I could do without gapless playback, I would have just continued to use my Blu-Ray player to send the multichannel music to my receiver.

Kodi: Just like Emby, very powerful software - but supposedly also with problems in gapless playback (Emby does it on iPhone/iPad or Android - but not on any Hi-Fi device… )

For more music streaming I probably should give Amazon HD a spin - and see if I can stream their Hi-Res files directly to my AV receiver - in Hi-Res…