Introducing Olympus & Olympus I/O - A new perspective on modern music playback

[Erikl]

Hi Emile, the Norwegian magazine Lyd og Bilde compared the sound quality of Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music, and its conclusions surprised me. Here's what they found (translated from Norwegian):

"Apple Music caught us off guard
The big surprise was Apple Music. Recording after recording, it outperformed both Tidal and Qobuz – two services that have long been the first choice for hi-fi enthusiasts. Qobuz, incidentally, was never poor – but never the best either. On a couple of recordings, it managed to match Apple Music, much to our delight. However, that was the exception, not the rule.

A challenge for the industry
From now on, Apple Music will be the editorial team's preferred choice. For the industry, this poses a challenge. Most music streamers have built-in support for Spotify and Tidal. Many support Qobuz. But very few support Apple Music. Spotify is integrated because it's the world's largest service. However, even though Apple Music is actually much larger than both Tidal and Qobuz combined, you usually have to resort to AirPlay to play Apple Music. When doing so, you don't get the hi-res quality we experienced in our test."

The testers used a HiFi Rose RS 451 streamer with Apple Music integrated. Do you think the findings will be the same on the Olympus? And given these findings, I'm wondering whether there is – or might be in the future – a way to utilise Apple Music directly on the Olympus?

 

[amadeus]

Hi Emile, the Norwegian magazine Lyd og Bilde compared the sound quality of Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music, and its conclusions surprised me. Here's what they found (translated from Norwegian):

"Apple Music caught us off guard
The big surprise was Apple Music. Recording after recording, it outperformed both Tidal and Qobuz – two services that have long been the first choice for hi-fi enthusiasts. Qobuz, incidentally, was never poor – but never the best either. On a couple of recordings, it managed to match Apple Music, much to our delight. However, that was the exception, not the rule.

A challenge for the industry
From now on, Apple Music will be the editorial team's preferred choice. For the industry, this poses a challenge. Most music streamers have built-in support for Spotify and Tidal. Many support Qobuz. But very few support Apple Music. Spotify is integrated because it's the world's largest service. However, even though Apple Music is actually much larger than both Tidal and Qobuz combined, you usually have to resort to AirPlay to play Apple Music. When doing so, you don't get the hi-res quality we experienced in our test."

The testers used a HiFi Rose RS 451 streamer with Apple Music integrated. Do you think the findings will be the same on the Olympus? And given these findings, I'm wondering whether there is – or might be in the future – a way to utilise Apple Music directly on the Olympus?

When I compare some albums that I have on CD Qobuz sounds a tad compressed less dynamic and on some other Qobuz is the better one.

The review you mention above smells a bit to "semi Apple Music commercial" of the Norwegian magazine Lyd og Bilde but of course I may be wrong....?

 

[joet]

When I compare some albums that I have on CD Qobuz sounds a tad compressed less dynamic and on some other Qobuz is the better one.

The review you mention above smells a bit to "semi Apple Music commercial" of the Norwegian magazine Lyd og Bilde but of course I may be wrong....?

Since Apple isnt integrated into hifi components, I wonder how they did a meaningful comparison. Also, did they test only Redbook, or did they include hi-res, which i dont think Apple supports. Assuming they're right however, I wonder what technology or approach is responsible for the difference. When I did apples to apples comparisons of Qobuz and Tidal, I couldn't tell the difference. But others might be more discerning than me.