This all means that Apple Music should sound better than Spotify for many listeners, though your mileage may vary. On top of all this, select records are available as Apple Digital Masters, which Apple says deliver the “highest possible quality audio.” Certain Apple Music albums even offer Hi-Res Lossless, which is an even richer audio resolution that gets you that much closer to studio quality. Lossless audio essentially avoids a lot of the data loss that happens when songs are compressed from their original source, giving you CD-quality sound from a digital file. The speakers on newer Mac models like the 24-inch iMac and 14-inch MacBook Pro also support Spatial Audio, but you won’t get quite the same immersive head-tracked experience.Įven if you’re not part of the AirPods army, Apple Music has another big advantage over Spotify: lossless and high-resolution audio. I found Spatial Audio to make a much bigger difference on the over-ear AirPods Max than on earbuds like the Beats Fit Pro, but the effect is still impressive regardless of what you’re wearing. Of course, you will need a supported pair of Apple headphones (such as the AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, AirPods 3 or Beats Fit Pro) to take advantage of this perk.

I quickly became obsessed with finding out which of my favorite albums were mixed in Dolby Atmos for immersive spatial listening, and had a blast listening to everything from chill indie to explosive hard rock from a new perspective. Not only did Spatial Audio track my head movements - keeping each instrument in a fixed place as if I were at a live concert - it also highlighted vocal harmonies and small background instrumentation I never noticed when listening on Spotify. I was calmly bobbing my head to Turnstile’s “Glow On” - an album I’ve listened to dozens of times - when the soaring anthemic chorus of the blistering punk song “Endless” suddenly hit me like a truck.

A few weeks back when testing out the AirPods Max, I decided to fire up Apple Music to see how the company’s immersive 360-degree Spatial Audio tech held up on the high-end headphones.

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