To recap briefly: AirPlay and Apple TV OS are limited to 24bit/48kHz, macOS doesn’t offer automatic sample rate switching, Android resamples all audio to 48kHz and Google Chromecast doesn’t do gapless playback. In my previous post on hi-res audio on Apple Music, I detailed how Apple’s ‘hi-res lossless’ content – 24bit/96kHz or 24bit/192kHz streams – are often downsampled or resampled by the playback hardware, often unbeknownst to the end-user and thus negating the benefits of streaming a hi-res file.
