For iPhone & iPad;
You have to Go to:
= Settings - Music - Audio Quality
Activate lossless audio and then make the respective quality settings!
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As a “hardcore” 
Apple user, I have found my Endgame streaming provider now.
Everything works perfectly with first-class sound quality 
To be honest, as a music lover, I have absolutely no use for the Dolby Atmos function for music.
As with Amazon’s 3D function, Apple Music D-A
now sounds completely unnatural and like a musical pulp, with which nothing can be realistically assigned spatially.
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The special atmos stuff is v odd sounding but it looks like you can just turn it off.
So far I’m loving lossless, sounds indistinguishable from what I was getting off tidal. Stoked to finally be able consolidate back down to 1 service.
.@2ape2escape In your listening so far, have you noticed a discrepancy in what Tidal offers via MQA versus Apple’s offerings in Hi-Res?
I did a quick survey. Led Zeppelin is on both services in MQA/Hi-Res. Tidal offers Hifi only for Interpol, while Apple Music had Hi-Res for those same Interpol albums. I’ll bet there’s going to be a bunch of losses (all puns intended) and gains in the top tier stuff across services. At least for a little while. Though, I’m guessing Tidal’s top tier catalog is probably larger, at the moment.
I’m on Tidal now. Recently left Apple Music in April before all this news broke. Ha.
My hope is that this forces Spotify to launch their lossless program as a free add-on to premium, since that’s what I’ve been using for years at this point
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Not so far, but I haven’t had a chance to sit down and really A/B. In the albums that I’ve heard an Apple lossless so far they’re indistinguishable from Tidal’s 16/44.1, but the MQA question is interesting.
Looks like we the Avalanches - “We will always love you” is MQA on tidal and lossless on Apple Music so I might use that to start.
The Apple lossless availability is kinda weird so far. The majors seem to have near total coverage, and while tons of smaller artists on smaller labels have lossless but not on every album. I believe the story is that right now ~20M songs are lossless and by EOY they’ll have the full 75M catalog
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Out of curiosity is Apple making available side by side the CD quality and Atmos versions of songs? The same holds for songs that are available in CD quality, Hi-Res and Atmos?
I’m fearing that the Atmos branding is trying to do with Apple what MQA is to Tidal. The marketing is a lot of nebulous speak and we know how that ends.
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I believe you can turn it off/on in settings so you have the option…
Yeah, you can just turn it off in the settings.
Yeah that’s my fear, that turning it off may simply turn off some unspecified filtering or worse, turn on a filter to turn the file into what seems to be a regular ALAC.
I doubt that Apple will collaborate to integrate with Roon since they’re obsessive about owning the whole ecosystem. I wonder if the desktop client will have more behind the scenes configuration as opposed to a mobile device client.
I’m rooting for Apple to suceed in this as good competition will spur all provider to improve. However if nothing else, Tidal proved that unless they’re willing to be entirely transparent, then they’re hiding something. And what better way to fight MQA which “it’s better than lossless” BS than to introduce your own flavor Atmos which “it’s better than MQA” kind of philosophy.
Not a fan of atmos PCM on a ATV4K.
So on Windows, there is an option called “Windows Audio Session” under audio options. It isn’t an exclusive mode from what I can tell!
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Well, nothing I can hear. For reference here’s what I actually tested:
Track: Blinding Lights - The Weeknd
I used 3 sources:
- Tidal (on Hi-Fi, not Master quality so 16/44.1 not MQA)
- Qobuz FLAC downloaded (16/44.1)
- Apple Music Lossless (24/44.1)
Gear:
- Matrix Mini Pro 3
- LCD 2Cs
- DT1990s
Apple Music won’t let you limit to 16 bit, you can limit to 24bit/ 48kHz or the full monte (up to 192)
I know the controversy around Tidal using the MQA filter even on HiFi setting but in my testing i really don’t think I could hear it doing anything different than Apple or the FLAC, obviously not a scientific test (as much as i’d love to say my ears are perfect 
) but so it goes…
So, with this pretty direct a/b/c test, and the other tracks i’ve listen to between tidal/apple today I’m prepared to call the “Is Apple Lossless actually the regular ALAC?” issue closed. Yes, sounds like it’s the real deal to me.
Now the other question in the thread here was Atmos, and … yeah that’s audible. It’s kinda weird, its like the mix engineer dragged the panning waaaaay out. The imaging takes a big hit but the sound stage does get bigger, so if there’s a specific time you want that effect this could be cool. I’ll be leaving it off personally, but damn I hope this makes it over to movies/TV. This processing would be crazy on a movie.
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Here is an interesting read by The Computer Audiophile on some potential problems of Apple Music new Lossless format
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The whole Spatial Audio thing isn’t all that black and white, you get something like Drive by R.E.M. and it sounds incredible and then you get Come Together by The Beatle and it sounds awful. Worse part is songs I want to hear in Spatial just isn’t available, like Out of the Woods by Taylor Swift.
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Yeah it’s very track by track.
I noticed some odd behavior as well. Sometimes the little lossless logo will drop or not show even if an album is marked as lossless, I honestly wonder if it’s not just launch a day bug or something. Glad folks with the right equipment are checking it out regardless.
Edit: yeah i think that was a bug, seems more consistent today.
Has anyone established what the bit depth and sample rate is for Apple Music’s Dolby Atmos tracks that stream to wired headphones via an external DAC on albums/tracks that carry both badges for Dolby Atmos and Hi-Res Lossless with Dolby Atmos set to “Always On”?
That was a mouthful.
An example album would be John Williams in Vienna
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