A recent post on Roon's forums drew my attention to an apparently new category at Apple Music, Apple's streaming service. The post pointed to an Apple Music page listing music curated by the ECM music label. After ECM "Playlists," "New and Noteworthy," and "Recent Releases" is a section labeled "High-Resolution Masters."
It has long been rumored that Apple was planning a high-resolution streaming service, but nothing has ever been confirmed. Also, anyone who's been following the streaming wars will find the phrase "high-resolution masters" evocative—most likely of MQA, Master Quality Authenticated, the codec from MQA Ltd. So far, among major streaming services, only Tidal has publicly embraced MQA. Has MQA Ltd, now struck a secret deal with Apple?
There's no word yet from either Apple or MQA (the company) about any such agreement, and without that, there's no apparent way to confirm or corroborate. Testing whether those files are indeed MQA-encoded would be a start—but that would require extracting bit-perfect output from the Apple Music stream and sending it to an MQA-enabled DAC to see if the blue or green light lights up—but that doesn't seem to be possible without serious hacking. iTunes isn't set up to provide bit-perfect output, and the Apple Music stream is apparently in a proprietary format. MacOS sends its output to external devices at whatever sample rate you set in the Mac's Core Audio, up to 32/384, regardless of the native streaming rate or format. Apps such as BitPerfect and Audirvana can assist iTunes in putting out bit-perfect data, but none (or none I've found) can directly access the proprietary Apple Music stream. If this is indeed something new, new Apple Music plumbing will be needed before it's actually useful.
Are these ECM albums the only high-resolution masters on Apple Music? I searched Apple Music for about an hour and didn't find any others; still, that seems unlikely. Whatever Apple is up to, it appears to be early days. And of course this could be nothing at all—just some Apple developer's fancy, inadvertently published. Also possible: it could be a legitimate new high-res Apple Music initiative—but some other technology and not MQA; the phrase "high-resolution masters" has been used in other contexts: Neil Young's Pono and Xstream ventures, for example. And Apple has long been collecting higher-resolution masters to create its "Mastered For iTunes" lossy-compressed files.
ECM announced in mid-November that their catalog would be made available for streaming on "services including Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, Deezer, Tidal and Qobuz." The press release didn't mention MQA—but a distribution agreement with Universal Music was mentioned, and Universal is in the process of encoding its whole library into MQA. Much of the ECM catalog is already available on Tidal in MQA—including many (perhaps all) of the albums listed on Apple Music in that "High-Resolution Masters" section.
MQA has proven controversial, with passionate supporters, even more passionate critics, and much incivility on blogs and social media. An Apple Music—MQA agreement would surely be greeted with cheers, cries, and indifferent shrugs—and, for better or worse, ensure MQA's survival for a good, long while. Stay tuned.
Update: Apple still hasn't gotten back to me about any plans to add high-resolution streaming to Apple Music, but they've made their plans, or lack of them, clear enough.
Tonight, December 30, I opened Apple Music and returned to the aforementioned page and found that the "High-Resolution Masters" header has disappeared, replaced by a new one: "Featured Albums." The content of the section remains the same.
What the heck? I've heard (from Audiostream.com editor Michael Lavogna among others) that Qobuz has a similarly named section on their ECM page. (As an American, I can't access Qubuz to confirm&$151;but Qobuz has announced that this will change soon.)
Just a guess, but maybe ECM itself maintains this page, and whoever's doing the work copied the design from Qobuz, including, briefly, the misleading header.
Update: Apple still hasn't gotten back to me about any plans to add high-resolution streaming to Apple Music, but they've made their plans, or lack of them, clear enough.
Tonight, December 30, I opened Apple Music and returned to the aforementioned page and found that the "High-Resolution Masters" header has disappeared, replaced by a new one: "Featured Albums." The content of the section remains the same.
What the heck? I've heard (from Audiostream.com editor Michael Lavogna among others) that Qobuz has a similarly named section on their ECM page. (As an American, I can't access Qubuz to confirm&$151;but Qobuz has announced that this will change soon.)
