Apple quietly rolls out a major upgrade for Apple TV users, offering high-resolution lossless audio support for the Apple Music app on Apple TV.
As Apple Music continues to vie with Spotify for music streaming dominance in the United States, the company quietly rolled out a serious upgrade last month for Apple TV users. Starting in September, the company said it would begin transitioning music streaming to high-resolution lossless audio support for the Apple TV’s Apple Music app.
Lossless audio allows listeners to experience uncompromised sound without any frequency loss, the company writes, and Apple Music subscribers can turn on the feature across all their supported devices. Apple adds that this tvOS 27 update will only be compatible with Apple TV 4K devices released after 2021, meaning that older Apple TV models will not support it.
“With an Apple Music subscription, you can turn on lossless audio across all of our devices and hear every preserved detail from the original recording,” writes Apple.
The company’s transition to high-res lossless audio for Apple Music on Apple TV arrives five years after the functionality rolled out for its full catalog, which as of 2026 includes over 100 million tracks. Some users might have difficulty telling the difference in sound quality, but experts describe high-res audio as producing an untouched, high-quality listening sensation.
“The soul and life of the mix is sitting in the extra bits of data that are stored in the lossless file,” said Apple Music Mastering Engineer Piper Payne back in 2021.
The transition to high-res lossless sound accompanied Apple’s addition of spatial audio with Dolby Atmos support for the service in order for artists to be able to create a more immersive experience. Some users compare lossless sound to CD-quality audio, “like the same sample rate every CD has,” wrote one Redditor.
The availability of high-quality audio is one of the features that sets Apple Music apart from many of its competitors, aiding in its ascension as the top Spotify rival in 2026. The two companies have alternated leadership for the most subscribers in the United States and remain poised to continue the battle in 2027.
