Apple Music - What is the bitrate used?

Function TIDAL / QOBUZ / SPOTIFY
#1

Hello,

I’ve have a RS250a (with latest firmware - 5.7.05) linked with an external DAC, that show me the bit rate used.

I’m surprised that the DAC tells me that the flow coming from the Apple Music App is 96 Khz for every track that i play.

Is the AppleMusic App does an up/down sampling to set everything at 96 Khz , am i missing something, or it is a feature that was previously added and that i wasn’t aware of (I had no external DAC before)?

All the others flows coming from the others applications are dispalyed on my dac with the correct bitrate.

Thanks for your enlightenments.

#2

Is it just Apple, or everything? I do not use Apple ecosystem, but on Youtube is the same thing, no matter what original sample rate is, Rose converts it to 96 kHz. I asked for a reason, but didn’t get the answer. Tidal is working normally, changing samplerate depending on the source.

#3

Hello Burle, I don’t know how you can change de sample rate for RoseTube and I don’t have a Youtube account, so I don’t know where you make your changes.

But I’ve tried, and in RoseTube, it gives me the same 96Khz sample rate.

So, I try to tweek the parameters to see if any had an influence on the sample rate.

I discover that if in the 'In/Out Setting, and goes in the configuration (gear icon) of the coax out that I’m using, in the ‘PCM Resampling Frequency’ parameter, I can change the ‘Max Sample Rate’.

If I set this parameters to 192 Khz (max that can be used in the Coax Out, then all the streams from RoseTube or AppleMusic are upsampled to 192Khz, even if the other parameter ‘Resemple Rate’ is set to Original.

As the parameters are used by both the Optical and the Coax Out, my guess is that if the ‘Max Sample Rate’ is left to ‘Automatic’, then the max is set to 96 Khz, which is the max that an optical output can handle.

And for our problem, it seems that RoseApp can’t catch the correct sample rate from Youtube and AppleMusic streams, and thus resample to the max possible (96 Khz, if parameter is left to ‘Automatic’).

So I don’t know if it’s a bug in the Rose Apps, or if the external streams didn’t handshake for the correct sample rate.
The investigation should be done by the Rose team.

I hope it can help you check if it’s the same problem by your side.

Regards,

1 Like
#4

Hello!

Thanky you for your help, but I know that I can set resampler on any rate, and Rose will resample it to that rate, but that is useless in this case because affects all sources. I can see that there is sort of problem with passing original samplerate (with resampling - source is not anymore strictly bitperfect), but if there is mostly odd resampling (48, 96 or 192) there will be no audible change in quality. But for 44.1 sources there might be audible change in quality.

#5

In fact, I don’t know which API are availables to Rose Hifi to access these streams.

As, it seems at least for Apple Music, they don’t have access to lossless in the API, I presume that the music is encoded in AAC 256 kbps, and thus limited to 44,1Khz as sample rate and lossy compression.

And if Youtube streams are not lossless (I have no clue about that in the API), I’m not sure you will really heard a difference, as the incoming stream is already lossy.