[jurmous]

I have YouTube premium and I have access to experimental features and coincidentally they offer one feature called audio in high quality. So they are working on improving it.

Description:

High-Quality Audio

Available until February 22

With high-quality audio, you can listen to music on YouTube in the best audio quality.

How it works: Watch an eligible music video on YouTube and enjoy the benefits of higher-quality audio.

Only available on iOS and Android.

[nemomarx]

why only on mobile? very curious

[guyzero]

likely end-to-end drm

[gruez]

There's no "end-to-end drm" for audio. Any audio can be captured near losslessly by plugging in a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter, and a sound card on the other end. There's also no HDCP-like mechanism for sound, so if you're willing to put the work into it, you could make a fake USB DAC that produces a bit perfect capture of the audio output.

[out_of_protocol]

Just use DAC with S/PDIF output, and another one with S/PDIF input. Well, either way it's hard enough to block casual users, so... it works

[p0w3n3d]

Once jack is removed from laptops it will be streamed to laptops as well... </irony>