Originally Posted: 2026-08-15
Manual Music and the Leaving of Streaming Services
Intro into Why
At the start of this year I decided that I really wanted to get into high fidelity (HiFi) music, despite what I was reading online about how a lot of people cannot reliably hear the difference in streaming music quality and HiFi quality. Thinking back, I’m not 100% sure what truly led me to this decision. I’m not an audiophile (at least not by my standards) but I have been collecting records for a couple of years now and I’ve been fascinated by the way that records sound as opposed to music stored digitally. The small cracks and pops of an old record instill in me a sense of nostalgia that I really enjoy. I’m an Apple Music subscriber and they have a Lossless Codec available which I turned on…. and didn’t notice any differences. At first, I thought this may be me being one of those people that can’t really hear the difference. So I looked some things up and was thrown down a rabbit hole of audio codecs, DACs and DAPs, bitrates, and headphones that was entirely not prepared for.
The Main Problem?
Apple devices, such as my iPhone, have an internal digital-to-analog converter (DAC). All audio devices have a DAC. If you want to listen to music and you aren’t using physical mediums such as cassettes or vinyls, you are plugged into a DAC, or a DAC is providing analog signals to your speakers. Not all DACs are created equal. An iPhone, without external device assistance, cannot output lossless audio in full fidelity except under certain circumstances or with the aid of specific Apple Devices (which I don’t own and don’t really have a desire to own).
DAC-tor DAC-tor Give Me The News
Apple’s own website lays out this issue on their support page concerning lossless audio through Apple Music.
How to listen to lossless on your iPhone or iPad
What you need
You can listen to lossless on an iPhone or iPad updated to the latest version of iOS or iPadOS using:
- A wired connection to headphones, receivers, or powered speakers
- The built-in speakers
- An external digital-to-analog converter to listen to songs at sample rates higher than 48 kHz
I didn’t own wired headphones, and the built-in speakers aren’t my use case, nor do I believe that one would be able to hear the difference using those small speakers anyways. The way that I saw it, there were a couple of options that I had. Since my iPhone cannot output lossless audio correctly, I could either get an external DAC adaptor that plugs into the USB-C port or get a dedicated audio player that was not attached to my iPhone at all. There are pros and cons to each, and the former is by far cheaper than the later. I wasn’t, and still am not, convinced that I would be happy with an external DAC for a couple of reasons. Regardless of an external device plugged into my iPhone, I still did not own wired headphones; and buying a DAC that transmitted a Bluetooth signal for my over-the-ear Sony headphone defeated the purpose of a DAC anyways as audio over bluetooth has its own problems.
Enter: The Wide World of Audio Devices
I never could have expected what I found when I started looking into a dedicated digital audio player (DAP). Let me tell you, dedicated audio players are alive and well. My last… DAP… or mp3 player, I guess you would call it… was an iPod Touch from 2008. Before that, audio players were ubiquitous! CD players, cassette players (shoutout my yellow walkman), mp3 players that cost $35 made by SANDISK OF ALL PEOPLE, and of course the iPod line. But once streaming services took over and everyone had an iPhone or Android phone in their pocket, they vanished. Or so I thought.
DAP, not Dab
Lossless is a very specific solution to a very much already solved problem. It is easy to listen to music. It’s even FREE to listen to music provided you have a radio, or a computer than can access YouTube, or if you can tolerate ads on Spotify’s free tier. But if you want to listen to high quality music or curate your music collection to your specific tastes, things get complicated fast (as you can tell from the previous section). Most companies flat-out stopped making dedicated audio players, and it makes sense! I think I’ve only seen Sony’s DAP from what I would consider a ’traditional’ tech company. However, there are still a ton of options that range from the extremely cheap to absurdly expensive.
FiiO and their product lines of DAPs ended up being my choice for a device that delivered everything I wanted. Specifically, I landed on the SnowSky Echo Mini. The next part is probably going to confirm to anyone reading this that I’m not a true audiophile, yet. I bought this for the following features:
- Can play FLAC files
- 3.5mm and 4.4mm outputs
- Can double as a desktop DAC when plugged into a computer, or external DAC for an iPhone
- EQ Available
This was my hitlist for my first DAC, and it has so far performed extraordinarily well for all of these use cases. I have found myself using my phone less and less, and truly use the DAC either plugged into a computer or stand-alone with my audio files on a microSD card.
Headphones. And IEMs.
Did you know that headphones are extremely varied in their build and quality? And I’m not really talking about using shitty plastic to make something cheaper. I’m talking about sound drivers, balanced vs single-ended plugs, frequency response, and a ton of other technical information. I didn’t, and honestly a lot about headphones is still very far above my head. However, during my research I learned about In Ear Monitors (IEMs) and how they are able to deliver some of the clearest and true-to-recording sound over all other types of headphones. Within IEMs there are still a lot of quality considerations, but I have found them to be crisp and fully immersive when used in conjunction with my DAP. I have a pair of balanced IEMs, which means they have a 4.4mm plug which allows for higher power to the buds as well as less noise to interfere with the music.
FLAC Off
The last piece to this puzzle is the audio files themselves. I haven’t been in the audio collection game in a really long time. It probably lines up with the last mp3 player that I owned, and possibly even before that since I wouldn’t consider the way I managed music in iTunes a ‘collection’. Regardless, where the hell do you get audio files these days? How do you own music? Who the hell owns a CD-ROM R/W drive anymore? Where did all my CDs go… I’ll be right back after I dig through my entire basement.
CDs are still a very viable source of audio files. The physical media can be ripped onto a computer and stored as a lossless FLAC file to replicate the quality of the CD directly. Which leads me to a very important topic, audio codecs. There are a lot of them, and they all serve a purpose which I find fascinating. FLAC, which stands for the Free Lossless Audio Codec, is a codec that compresses audio files without any loss and can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original file. A codec is an encoded format for digital audio, or how an audio file is stored digitally (in general). There are lossy, lossless (like FLAC), and uncompressed audio codecs:
- Lossy = smallest file size, worse audio quality, reduces bit resolution
- Lossless = smaller file size, can be decompressed to original, doesn’t reduce the bit resolution like lossy codecs
- Uncompressed = largest file size, no compression, no loss, considered ‘source’
When ripping from a CD, the Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) is read which is an uncompressed way to represent analog waveforms digitally. Is can be immediately encoded to FLAC which reduces the overall file size, while retaining the ability to be decompressed into the exact same PCM format that existed on a CD originally. All of that being said, a lot of my music comes from rips of CDs into FLAC format and then stored on my internal NAS shares.
With the focus today being on streaming and easy access to as much music as possible, CDs are not all that easy to find for newer releases and smaller artists. If you want to own your music and be in control of it, a very good option is purchasing it from Bandcamp. Artists can post their music for sale on Bandcamp and receive, on average, 82% of the profit. Bandcamp allows you to download the music you purchase in various formats, including lossless ones. It is a fantastic way to support your favorite artists while also maintaining control over your library.
Did I Ever Hear a Difference?
Well… interesting question. I THINK so. And I THINK that I can hear a difference between the way the music sounds when I’m using Apple Music + Wireless headphones and my DAC + IEMs. I do know for sure that I’ve gained a greater appreciation for music as a whole. The IEMs are extremely crisp and clear and I do find myself listening more intently to the music and playing with the EQ to achieve a sound that is the best for my ears.
The things that I have enjoyed the most about this journey has been collecting and organizing music again. There is something special about physical media, intentional listening, building playlists with the music you own, listening to a album all the way through to find new music, and exploring your local thrift store’s used media section. These are the same reasons I fell into collecting records a couple of years ago. I’ve also already been looking into different DAPs for different listening experiences, and I’ve taken to playing my music at home from my personal library rather than Apple Music (cmus!).