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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Any episode where Alex is talking about using green Sharpie pens to line the edge of CDs is a good episode! I remember those days; that was fun stuff. Snopes has an article referencing a double-blind experiment performed with altered CDs. Shouldn’t that be called a “double-deaf” experiment? 
In the late 1980s, Headroom (website headphonecom) was selling one of the first headphone amps. One of the big features of this amp was a L/R crossover. A small percentage of the sound from the L channel was fed to R (and R to L). For low-frequency sounds, there was a small delay added to the crossover. For higher-frequency sounds, the phase of the sound was shifted a bit instead. Echolocation through through processing phase shift of sounds is well-documented in science papers. For better or worse, Headroom has stopped making their own headphone amplifiers.
Excellent discussion about the Epic lawsuit. My one wish is that the judge doesn’t presume that she is the smartest person in the room. If she really feels the urge to do a compromise, I hope she simply drops Apple’s take from 30% to 20% (and maybe a corresponding drop in the <$1M developers). That is a settlement where nobody will be excessively happy.
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Hi Leo, I am a long time consumer of MacBreak Weekly, it creates a good diversion on Tuesday evenings. I want to comment on the discussion on the impending Apple Music lossless. Almost all of the commentary on the web and YouTube that I have read and heard has centered around the “headphone issue”, which I think is a Red herring. Even if AirPods were not Bluetooth constrained one would likely not hear the benefits of lossless. I am a music lover and when I want to sit down and listen to music I do so with my 2 channel stereo, listening to CDs, LPs ( yes Rene LPs) and streaming Tidal (lossless). [The only times that I use my AirPods are listening to podcasts, YouTube and Zoom calls. ] I have a good DAC ( Bryston ) so as I see it Apple needs to offer a bridging device that will accept lossless Wi-Fi with digital outs; this then would enable porting Apple Lossless to my Stereo system.
A historical note: about 15 or 16 years ago after iTunes was introduced I ripped to my hard drive about 500 CDs. I put an Airport express in my audio cabinet connected the
“headphone jack” with an appropriate optical cable to my DAC at the time ( Audio Alchemy) and using the remote app was able to stream my ripped music via wifi to my Audio system. So perhaps Apple can revive this for use with Apple Music lossless.
The intended market of Apple Music lossless is not the headphone crowd but those who subscribe to Tidal and Qobuz.
Ps I found Rene overly critical and dismissive of lossless those who support it, in fact he was almost angry about it. Lossless Apple Music is obviously not for him.
Regards
Thom
@Leo said, again, that the EU is going after US tech in a slanted way. If you actually look at the prosecutions in Europe, a lot of European and Asian companies are also caught up in it. Osram and Philips were fined under the cartel rules for price fixing light bulbs a couple of years back, hundreds of companies have been prosecuted under GDPR, every month there is a new breach and a new scandal about data being leaked or non-compliance with GDPR. The big difference seems to be that European companies abide by the law and are contrite, when something happens and they work with the authorities to clear up the problem . US big tech comes in and acts like the law doesn’t apply to them and keep putting off doing anything to comply with the law, until the cost of lawyers + fines exceeds the cost of actually operating legally. They also have the plus side of being able to run to the US press and say, “look, Europe is picking on us, oh we poor little computer companies are being treated unfairly!” All the time raking in more money from breaking the law than it is costing them to keep paying the fines. There are some exceptions, Microsoft is doing its best to woo European businesses by making EU data centers, but ever with the new plan, they cannot guarantee that data won’t be illegally (from the view point of the data owner and the jurisdiction they have to operate in) handed over to US authorities (Patriot Act, CLOUD Act etc.).
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This has always been the issue with some of the lossless music services, no easy way to get them bit-perfect to your decent hifi. So I stick with Qobuz. AirPlay can handle lossless I think, so that’s Apple’s solution, get a streamer that supports that. Or Belkin do an AirPlay 2 adapter they say does 16/44.1…
If curious about Dolby Atmos for music there’s a demo. I struggle to hear objects in front or behind me. All sounds left and right channels to me 
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I find the discussion regarding the iPad Pro cameras rather humorous. I remember the days when absolutely everyone on TWIT shows laughed about anyone using a camera on an iPad due to its size, and the awkwardness of it.
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