A lot has been done these days of improvements in Apple Music regarding lossless sound and spatial sound.
Lossless sound is focused on improving quality at the cost of greatly increasing the size of the data file, which causes music to take up a lot more and need a lot more bandwidth to reach the user than to the high quality format that is used so far: CAA.
But Apple surprised us yesterday with the new version of the iOS 14.6 operating system because it incorporates a new ability to stream music, just in the opposite direction: HE-AAC.
HE-AAC (High Efficiency - Advanced Audio Coding or High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) is an evolution of the 2003 AAC that achieves similar (slightly lower) quality but using far less information. To give us an idea, HE-AAC allows, at most 80 kb / s, a much smaller size than the standard AAC of iTunes Plus or Apple Music of 256 kb / s (although AAC can go much more). Plus, it also allows for multi-channel, so it won't be a problem for spatial sound.
With this possibility we will save a lot of data and storage space. To turn it on, go to Settings> Music & Mobile Data Playback.
This is not something new for Apple systems, they have been supporting it for a long time, the novelty is that they allow us to use it with the music we download from Apple.
Opinion
I have been testing this format for a long time and the truth is that it is very good. I had to do many many tests blindly, with good headphones, connected via cable (not to be influenced by Bluetooth) in order to distinguish the sound quality.
It is true that with good equipment, with a lot of attention, you can feel that the higher treble shines a little less with HE-AAC. Remember that the highs are the ones that need more quality, more data and more sample rate to be reproduced faithfully. In a voice conversation, for example, it wouldn't be noticed at all.
