Tesla could soon support lossless content on Apple Music, according to Discord user Merk, who came across a Hi-Fi icon when listening to Apple Music over WiFi. While Apple Music isn’t the first or only Hi-Fi option, it’ll be great to see another service with high-quality streaming.
With the upcoming 2024.26 update, Tesla is adding YouTube Music and Amazon Music, so there has definitely been a recent trend to add more music services and increase Premium Connectivity usage.
Apple Hi-Fi
Given the screenshot, it seems that Tesla may support Apple Music lossless audio streaming, but this wasn’t announced in any of the release notes or anywhere else. We’re not 100% sure yet whether this is just a bug in the UI or an upcoming feature – but Merk did mention he was on WiFi when he saw it.
He also noted that it sounded clear, but it's hard to assess whether the quality is better without listening to an A:B sample of the same track – one Hi-Fi, and one regular. Apple Music as a streaming service does support a lossless high-quality streaming codec on the AAC format – Apple brought lossless music to its Android Apple Music app in 2022 for flagship Android devices that have DAC support. However, they don’t support “bit-perfect” or “true Hi-Fi” on non-Apple devices.
If you’ve seen the Apple Hi-Fi icon on your Apple Music in your Tesla, let us know on X.
What Is Hi-Fi Audio
What exactly is Hi-Fi audio you may ask? Well, here’s a short, non-audiophile rundown. There are two major types of audio – High Fidelity, and regular. High Fidelity audio is further broken down into two types – regular Hi-Fi and “bit-perfect”.
Regular Hi-Fi audio is still compressed, and some information can still be lost, but it is still higher quality than a CD or MP3 file. Meanwhile, “bit-perfect” audio is uncompressed, raw audio that should be a 1:1 match for what the studio produced and is how it is intended to be heard.
Tidal’s Hi-Fi Audio
For now, Tesla’s Hi-Fi audio choice has been limited to Tidal, a smaller, slightly lesser-known competitor to other music streaming services. While Tidal may be less known, it does bring “bit-perfect” Hi-Fi audio with it, but with some exceptions.
Hi-Fi audio on Tidal has to be downloaded in advance on WiFi and takes up space on your Tesla’s glovebox USB drive (or part of the game storage space on the internal SSD on the Models S and X). This means that while you can listen to Hi-Fi audio on Tidal, you’d have to download albums or playlists in advance, otherwise you’d get stream-quality audio.
Tesla puts a massive amount of effort into their audio engineering, so Hi-Fi music is a great benefit for Teslas.
