Customers get better quality audio for less data so cell companies are happy. These are - in addition to codec efficiencies - a lot of new data compression technologies in play that work faster because assumptions about the playback platform's CPU are made (ARMv7 and higher) this became important because most music streaming customers use metered internet connections via their phones, so when faced with 350kbps vs 256kbps that sounds better - all the cell co operators are much happier with Apple Streams than (say) Spotify's Ogg Vorbis (which sounds pretty good for a mid 1990s technology). Its pretty interesting stuff, not always chosen for reasons audiophiles think are important but have knock on effects that benefit them anyway. I looked into this in depth when Apple's 256kps Apple Music service started sounding as good as the ripped CD masters and I wondered why.
If an audiophile cannot cope with the idea that AAC can be as good as Lossless/WAV then that is their problem, not anyone else's.
It makes a lot of financial sense for Apple to use as little data as possible from Server to Client so they have worked quite hard on the AAC codec to make "lossy" formats sound as good as the WAV and Master. I think this year we will finally see a merging of Apple Music and iTunes as both platforms share massive chunks of the same audio framework with merging APIs.Ģ56Kbps sounds as good as lossless when MFiT (Mastered for iTunes) is used. Last year was especially big because ARE, the Audio Rendering Engine was not rewritten but refined to make better use of h.264 in audio containers, and it was one reason why "lossy" 256kbps AAC Audio MFiTs can sound as good as lossless WAV files now. I don't really know anything about Jriver but iTunes sees a major revision in the codec manager platform annually. There are better compression efficiencies where h.264 can be used and loads more encoding profiles that are decoded and understood with far lower processor overhead. There have been for some years some incremental releases that improve aspects from better window functions (these are used to correct spectral anomalies) and better representation of signal >16kHz, a much better joint stereo separation algorithm (where different stereo separation methods are employed at different frequency ranges).
Yes Apple puts a lot of work into the way codecs are handled in the OS (more in iOS but this also trickles down to MacOS) and the way audio (especially AAC) works within the hardware it runs on.
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