Took me a while to figure out I had to set the device to “pass through”. Apple seems to try and send it through as 23.97fps in Europe, which leads to stuttering. There is also a weird bug with 24fps content. Two things take getting used to: the weird remote on iOS (no separate app) and the lack of ‘casting’ in Apple TV or Netflix on iOS. I like how it took me through the settings progressively (the “onboarding” in technical terms) instead of all at once: every subsequent time I booted the device it asked one question do you want Siri on? Which display mode? Connect iCloud? It only has three ports: hdmi, Ethernet and power. The Apple TV is a small black rectangular box with rounded corners. I will definitely miss Last.FM integration on iOS, but is that enough to hold me back?įYI: Spotify is set to the highest quality, and disabled audio normalization and cross fade (both lower sound quality for some reason). These new music discoveries became increasingly rare on Spotify over the past year, and I kept getting the same songs I already skipped. I used to like Spotify’s recommendations, such as Discover Weekly. Even Apple’s album-art is higher quality: Spotify has been promising “hifi audio” for two years now and hasn’t delivered yet. This leads to bigger file sizes but also better sound quality. I think this advantage of Apple Music is due to its high bitrate, special mixing and Dolby. I listened to Apple Music a full day on there. The difference is clear even on my budget headphones, but it became more pronounced on my better speakers. It sounded more like an old-fashioned CD instead of a compressed streaming source (I see the irony in being surprised to have quality back to the level we took for granted 20 years ago). The results were impressive! The Apple Music version was considerably better than Spotify in terms of detail, clarity and soundstage. It’s an old bluetooth headset (without active noise cancellation) and playing a song Apple recommended: “Own my mind” by Maneskin. This time I put my headset on and I was literally (figuratively) blown away by the audio quality. I didn’t mean to try out Apple Music, especially since last time I rated it worse than Spotify, but I accepted the two-month free trial was on autopilot. Regular readers of this blog (ha! That’s a joke) know I appreciate good sound quality in a streaming service. The pixelation only occurs in fast moving objects: everything else is razor sharp on Netflix. I tried to make a photo of the effect on my TV, but failed. In my opinion the 4K plan should only offer better quality for 4K TVs.Įxample of banding an pixelation. That plan might also lead to better quality on our TV, but the added costs are 4 euro per month. We have a1080p tv and are on the Netflix HD plan. Noticeably worse than Apple, still great enough for enjoying content. This can be the reason for the higher quality (bitrate isn’t everything: the quality of the codecs and transcoding process also matters). In other words, they use more data for the same image. It’s a close call if I would say Apple TV+ content is still better intuition says yes.Īccording to tests online, Apple TV+ has a 40% higher bitrate. Netflix quality does improve when streaming from the Apple TV (for the majority of the shows). It’s not a problem of internet bandwidth: Chromecast and Apple TV are both on the same WiFi. With Netflix on Chromecast I notice banding/quantization in some content: gradients are “blocky” instead of smooth. Colors are sharper, resolution is higher, and black is really black. I was surprised our television is actually this good □. Movies bought on iTunes or part of Apple TV+ have a much higher quality than Netflix on the Chromecast. This time I noticed the difference in quality with respect to the other services I normally use (Netflix and Spotify). I got a couple months of “free” services (LOL, I paid that with the ridiculous profitmargin on the physical product): two months for Music and three months for TV+. But this blog post is not about the machine: it’s about the attention to quality of the Apple services. It complements our Chromecast: now we can buy the movies we want to watch on iTunes if they are not on Netflix. Apple versus Spotify and Netflix: who wins on quality?
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