Although a sizable portion of Apple Music’s catalogue is available in high definition, there are many other options for high-definition audio on your iPhone. Later, we’ll look at other possibilities. It’s important to keep in mind that true hi-res audio cannot currently be listened to over Bluetooth. There are better Bluetooth codecs available, such as LDAC, but they still compress the audio to send it to your headphones or wireless earbuds. The relationship between the iPhone 14 pro max and high-resolution music has a long and complicated history. It’s unfortunate because iPhones have consistently ranked among the best-sounding smartphones available. Users have had to rely on workarounds to get their iPhones to play nicely with high-resolution files because Apple has never really pushed the idea of playing high-resolution audio on its smartphones. However, times are a changing. It has actually never been simpler to download high-resolution music to your iPhone thanks to the rise of music streaming services that are equipped with millions of hi-res tracks.
Steps to Listen to Hi-Res Audio on iPhone
What About Lossless Audio
We must begin where most things pertaining to audio do in order to comprehend lossless audio: with the human ear. Except in extremely rare edge cases, most people can only hear sounds with a frequency between 20Hz and 20kHz. Although it can change and declines with age, in general that’s where all of the sounds you’ll ever hear—whether coming from headphones or from the outside world—lie. But that doesn’t mean other frequencies don’t exist just because you can’t hear them. Take a dog whistle as an illustration; while you cannot hear it, your dog can. Every frequency that a microphone can detect when recording music and converting it to digital format is saved, even if you’ll never hear it. The term “lossless audio” refers to the type of file compression—or lack thereof—used to reduce stream bitrates or file sizes. This contrasts with lossy compression, which lowers audio quality in order to reduce file sizes. Although MP3 is the most well-known form of lossy audio compression, it is losing ground to better-sounding formats. Aural data can be lossy or lossless. Digital has long been dominated by compressed lossy files (like MP3 and AAC). They essentially approximate a raw music file, trying to remove “irrelevant” information that listeners cannot hear in order to reduce file size while also losing information in the process. This is comparable to the process of creating a compressed JPEG file from a high-resolution scan. The trick is striking the right balance between file size and preventing a material degradation that makes quality differences too obvious.
Hi-Res Audio Formats
Up to 80% of the information in the original recording may be lost when converting music into a format that can be easily streamed. The same holds true when converting a CD-based original recording to an MP3 file. Lossless audio is the aim of high-resolution audio. In other words, a music file keeps all the data that was provided during the initial studio recording process. Usually, a lossless file is not compressed. Nevertheless, some compression algorithms permit the preservation of all necessary data. When it comes to streaming, there are more hi-res audio formats available than we can possibly list here, so we’ll focus on the most popular ones. When looking for high-resolution music, FLAC, or the Free Lossless Audio Codec, will be the most prevalent format. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec, also known as ALAC, is less frequently seen. Both deliver high-resolution audio in a lossless format while maintaining reasonable file sizes. Hi-res music is occasionally distributed as uncompressed PCM WAV files, but this is uncommon due to the size of the files. Although they occasionally appear as downloadable digital copies of vinyl records, you shouldn’t count on seeing them too frequently. With regard to bit depth and frequency, it stands to reason that higher numbers are preferable. They are undoubtedly bigger in every way, including file sizes. High-resolution audio files are enormous; single albums can easily top 1 GB in size, making Apple Lossless, FLAC, and AIFF audio files seem small. The problem is that 16bit audio effectively handles what listeners can hear, making it difficult to argue for higher-resolution audio even in the best of circumstances, let alone when using mobile devices with limited storage.
Final Words
We hope you like our article on how to Listen to Hi-Res Audio on iPhone. It’s a marketing term for audio recording quality that is superior to CD. The sample rate is a crucial component of a track’s quality. This determines the amount of dynamic range and how frequently the original source material is captured. These two will have a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and a bitrate of 16 bits on a CD. With 96kHz and 24bit, high-res audio offers significantly more, so there is more detail to work with on those tracks. Some online music retailers now promote high-resolution files that, according to their advertising, go far beyond CD audio but, upon closer examination, also beyond the range of human hearing. You’ll notice that music is described as 24/96, or 24bit/96 kHz. The potential dynamic range capture within a given slice of time increases with increasing bit depth, whereas frequency refers to the sample rate, or the number of audio slices captured per second. As a result, 96 kHz audio is sampled at a rate that is more than twice as fast as 44.1 kHz audio. Apple has released the iPhone with iOS 16 support, which you can easily buy from Best Buy.
