Cross posted from roon:
My take. Apple is just checking the lossless box. They don’t really care about “audiophiles,” even those fully in their ecosytem. Unless you are listening on a phone and airpods or whatever. Maybe?
Just like amazon, they don’t have any good way to play lossless to your home hi-fi.
I got Apple’s free trial a couple of weeks ago just to see, in anticipation of the lossless launch. The phone and tablet apps are nice. They have some nice playlists and nice recommendations and whatnot.
But I have Windows and Android. The only way I could find to play anything to my hi-fi was chromecast. That worked ok. AAC didn’t sound bad, in spite of whatever happened to it between my phone and chromecast.
Then Apple lossless went live. Except for Android. That’s ok, I thought. I’ll wait. Then, curiously, about the same time, chromecast stopped working. When I tried to play something, it skipped through a bunch of tracks and popped up a message saying Apple Music is not supported on this device at this time.
Ok, I guess the message is buy an iPhone? No thanks.
So I deleted the app and canceled my Apple Music subscription.
Then I got curious about Amazon Music HD. I had tried it before, but it had the same problem of not being able to play lossless to my home hi-fi. But I thought I’d check in again to see if anything had changed.
I discovered that I was indeed able to play from the Amazon app to my Denon Avr. And it appeared to be playing CD quality flac. Which is close enough for me. Bonus, you can add local files. So I fooled around with that all day, and had much better results than Apple Music.
Alas, the situation deteriorated after a few hours. The app kept getting out of sync or just stopped playing. Restarting the app fixed it, but not for long.
So, I have tried Amazon app, Apple app, Tidal app, Qobuz app, and Spotify app in various configurations. Spotify came closest, with their excellent app and discovery and their ubiquitous connect feature, but no lossless. Not that I can hear much difference. I guess I’ll see what Spotify comes up with, but I’m not holding my breath.
So anyway, every time I look around I keep coming back to Roon+Qobuz. As far as I’m concerned this is the current state of the art for music playback, sound quality, library management and curation. No other software or service comes close. (And that includes Qobuz without Roon as a front end.)
I’m riding with Roon+Qobuz until one of us dies. Hopefully, that won’t be for a long time. But then again I’m pretty old.
P.S. Apple and Amazon seem to be starting a price war to drive competitors out. Doing my math, Roon+Qobuz cost me about $25 per month. Right now, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, etc. don’t offer anything close to the value I get from Roon+Qobuz, even at less than half the price.