Apple Lossless

[Kno]

This is interesting

[Kno]

[Chip]

Can you notice a difference and is it available for both downloads and streaming ?

Much as I like vinyl, it's nice to be able to get good sound quality out of an iThing.

[Kno]

I’m not sure I can notice the difference

There are three qualities, in my simple view, the normal mp3  / aac quality, CD quality and superior quality.  For superior quality you need a dac somewhere.   For cd quality you need wired headphones or, I assume, a jack that terminates in rca for your amp.
you can stream and download cd/superior quality from Apple.   As I understand it if you blue tooth cd quality to your amp that’s lossy (blue tooth has limited bandwidth) so no point having cd quality.

Overall it’s a good next step forward and means the average joe like me can have 60,000,000 cd quality tracks within my monthly subscription (over wired headphones).   I’m in a sweet spot because my iThingies are new enough to take iOS 14.6 but old enough to have 3.5mm jacks.  I believe Spotify , Amazon are following the lead.

[Chip]

I did have my iPad connected from the Lightning port to the USB of my CD player, which has a DAC.  Fed up with being tethered by a long wire, I bought an Apple Airport Express.  That connects to WiFi and plugs into the spare radio input on my amp.  It allows me to connect the iPad and the hifi wirelessly.  Despite being a bit of a technological Luddite, it all connected quite easily.

I don’t know what sort of sound quality the WiFi link is using but it sounds good enough to me