Apple lossless goes up to 24bits at 192KHz, which is over 4mbps. I believe bluetooth 5.x only supports 2mbps, although I'm not sure.
According to wikipedia, Apple did file a patent in 2019 for high bandwidth low latency audio streaming over bluetooth (up to 8mbps)[0]. Looks like they've been working on this for a while.
I assume that "up to 8mbps" probably means that in reality you can't use much more than 1 mbps because in a crowded space with lots of wifi devices and lots of other people using bluetooth headphones there will be lots of interference and data rates will be forced to go down.
Bluetooth and Wifi already don't properly coexist - one device can transmit a bluetooth packet and another a wifi packet at the same time, and the likelihood is both packets will get clobbered and lost. Proper coexistence would involve a device saying "I want to reserve Frequency bands X, Y and Z for the next 1 millisecond", and then no other devices using those frequency bands for that time. That exists for wifi clients, but it doesn't interoperate with Bluetooth, thread or zigbee.
This is why "audiophile" is a joke term in the audio engineering community.
It is not biologically possible for us (unless one is an alien) to hear above 22kHz. 44.1kHz is enough to record in perfect fidelity [0]. For strictly listening purposes, 192kHz/24bit is wasteful, just extreme overkill because "bigger numbers = more good".
People can't even reliably detect a difference between 320kbps MP3s and source-quality FLAC/ALAC/WAV/PCM. On very good headphone and speaker setups. Good quality MP3/AAC is all one needs for airpods and the bluetooth protocol can easily handle those bitrates.
edit: changed record->playback. Here I'm just discussing playback; for audio production purposes 192kHz/24bit is desireable for several reasons. Once one ships that album/song though, it should be downmixed back to 44.1kHz/16bit.
I support getting the sampling rate and quality up. To what level? Idk.
Have you ever been in a room with a DJ playing low quality music on a decent sound system? It's awful, grating. Now at least your everyday aspiring DJ has access to higher bitrate tunes and doesn't need to blast low quality junk out of the PA system.
While I can understand that bluetooth limits the data transmission rate, now it becomes even more puzzling that the AirPods Max don't support data transmission via lightning cable. With that they could fully support lossless and high res audio in full quality. How can Apple release such expensive, some people even used the word "overpriced" headphones without that features, especially with the new tiers of Apple Music coming?
For what it’s worth, I’ve got the Bose QC35 and regardless of whatever the battery claims are, I often get multiple working days out of them.
They also have a pretty light clamping force compared to most over ear headphones I have or have used, so even with glasses they’re quite comfortable to wear all day.
And if the batteries do run out, they still work as headphones (sans ANC) with a cable.
The QC20 kinda seem like the worst of all worlds for me. Wired so you’ve got cables to catch on things, battery-dependant, in-ear…
I'm impressed you can wear earbuds all day. I can't even wear headphones all day, let alone earbuds. Earbuds for me max out at about one hour at a time before they get too uncomfortable.
I think the real question is why AirPods Max have received tons of praise for their unmatched audio quality when they were released, and now suddenly are talked down to second tier because they don’t support lossless?
I mean, surely all those audiophile testers were aware that they are listening to compressed music? Or is this a recent realisation?
The praise that I heard was about the quality of the transparency mode and the integration with Apple's ecosystem. On the reviews that I saw the reviewers were very careful not to claim unmatched audio quality.
To be honest, I don't think that this is a big limitation in practice. The AirPods max do sound excellent and I do think that "lossless" audio is a bit overrated, a high quality AAC file can sound quite amazing. So personally, I am more interested in the spatial audio which is fully supported. But considering that some people think that lossless audio is important it is not understandable that the Apple flagship headphones which just have been released do not support it.
I think the audiophile testers are usually more concerned about the sound-stage than they are about the compression considering the market the Airpod Max's are aimed at - particularly for Bluetooth Headphones.
To add on top of that, they own the full stack, they can (as they already did in the past) use their 100% proprietary way to achieve this. They don't obey to common standards.
Apparently lossless streaming cannot be supported on the newest bluetooth spec, and will probably require some kind of wired headphones for the near future.
If this is accurate then Bluetooth continues to disappoint.
Bluetooth reminds me a lot of the F-35: Designed to do everything, does none of it particularly well, hard to build/maintain, and frankly would have been better off as three or four competing standards that did their "thing" well and nothing else.
Might be time to retire it, do a clean sheet audio-only standard, that is easy enough to implement/re-implement with actual tests for all the functionality.
> Bluetooth reminds me a lot of the F-35: Designed to do everything, does none of it particularly well, hard to build/maintain, and frankly would have been better off as three or four competing standards that did their "thing" well and nothing else.
Hard disagree. Bluetooth has an important disadvantage, in that its quality is bad. But it's also got an important advantage: it works, at all.
Basically anything made from early 00s onwards will be able to connect to a modern pair of Bluetooth headphones. Interop is the selling feature.
I would have agreed with you prior to Bluetooth 4.0, the LE spec.
LE is a cleanroom specification developed by Nokia and delivered wholesale to the Bluetooth SIG in 2010. It's much more limited in scope, limited in bandwidth and designed to fill a niche around low-power, low-bandwidth devices instead of F-35'ing with WiFi-type capabilities.
It'll get faster in time - each new revision brings with it a faster PHY without compromising on power consumption. It's up to about 2Mbits/sec now, as of 5.0. It's not quite up to where it needs to be to support streaming high-fidelity lossless audio, but it'll be there shortly. It's the right tool for the job - for once - we just need to let it mature a bit.
[edit] Double-checking how AirPods connect, but I'm almost confident it's analogous to LE Audio spec in 5.1
The claim that the F-35 is inferior to single role aircraft like the F-22 is also unfounded. None of us knows the specifics about the two airplanes but we do know that the F-35 has superior weapon systems, durability, communications, and spatial awareness.
There are planned upgrades to make the F-22 compatible with the max off boresight capability of the AIM-9X, with its future LOAL capabilities, and there are plans to coat it with more durable radar reflective "paint". The F-35 has all of those today.
The AirPods Max digitize wired input with a 48kHz sample rate for processing, so even using the ($29!) cable won't deliver any sort of benefit from this.
"Lossless" just means there is no (lossy perceptual) compression involved. You could absolutely have a 48khz lossless signal, or even 44.1khz if you were dealing with a CD rip, and it would likely still measure better than the lossy equivalent audio sent over AAC or aptX via Bluetooth.
I'll skip the whole debate about how good perceptual lossy encodings actually are these days and whether any person could reasonably expect to hear that measured difference, but just wanted to clarify that the sample rate of the headphones' built-in ADC shouldn't be conflated with the lossless codec.
Does Bluetooth support binary transfer? Why can’t it be just a dumb wireless data transfer protocol. Instead you have profiles and lossy compression. Turn on a mic and the quality drops to phone quality 30 years ago.
There are „just data“ profiles. The issue is nobody has actually thought up a protocol for it.
A funny thing I‘d do if I had more time and energy to dedicate to the topic of Bluetooth telephony (HSP and HFP are garbage for arbitrary reasons) would be opening a network and doing reasonable quality telephony over it to demonstrate it‘s possible.
I think the tradeoff is often quality:latency. The higher the quality, the bigger the buffer, and the longer the latency?
In anecdotal data, I noticed that my Bluetooth headphones had latency so bad they were not usable for gaming (CS:GO, Valorant). Switching the codec to aptX reduced latency noticable but also dramatically reduced quality to somewhere similar to a phone call (flat, noisy).
No. True Lossless Audio streaming could work wine on BT, even newest LE has excess bw to support it (BT 5 - 2Mbit/s). What it cant support is losslessly streaming Ultrasonic audio intended for Bats (and batshit crazy audiophools).
Why does the lossless playback need to be streaming though? This is the fundamental mistake in the analysis of why the AirPods max lack the ability to support this service offering.
The headphones should have gigs of buffer and be able to manage lossless with a great UX to support this.
People are already used to buffer waits for streaming video and this is already a niche use case.
Apple took our headphone jacks, then gave us lossless audio. How generous. My 6s is starting to show its wear, unfortunately.
I don't expect it, but I truly hope the next iPhone has a headphone jack. People want airpods whether or not their phones have headphone jacks, it was insecure to take it away in the first place. Have some faith in your products.
On the plus side, I often get to pick the music in my friends' cars.
I have a couple of those, and they work fine. The only downside is you can't use wired charging and wired headphones at the same time unless you use a third-party splitter, none of which have great reviews.
The MagSafe charger kind of solves this, since it's at least easy to pick up with the charger attached, but MagSafe chargers are more expensive than Lightning cables, and the official one has a very short cord.
In my dream world, the iPhone would have two Lightning (or USB-C) ports, but I don't expect that to ever happen.
Even if the phones still had a headphone jack, how good is the tiny integrated DAC that's driving it? I really doubt the difference would be perceivable
Apple products consistently use excellent built-in DACs. Search "audio" on the following page for detailed analysis and measurements of several different Apple devices. https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/index.htm
> People want airpods whether or not their phones have headphone jacks
Are you suggesting that Apple removed the jack in order to sell AirPods? Seems a bit cynical and doesn't even make sense. I think they removed it for engineering and design reasons. If you need it back there's an official adapter that costs just a few dollars.
Are people surprised by the idea that a company might make design decisions based on their entire product catalog and long-term marketing strategies?
In my mind this isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just what you'd expect from a competent company. If nobody in the decision-making process to remove the headphone jack asked how it would affect long-term AirPod sales, then that just seems like a pretty big oversight on their part, doesn't it?
Spotify bought podcasts so it tie them to a DRM-encumbered platform with ads, Facebook bought Oculus so it could monetize the data, consoles remove disk drives in part to drive digital purchases and cut down on game reselling, iMessage is iPhone exclusive because it makes it harder to switch to Android, and Apple cares about influencing long-term consumer trends in the headphone market. I don't necessarily agree that acknowledging this stuff counts as being cynical.
Perhaps cynical, perhaps a baseless conspiracy. I'll own up to that. But I don't think it's such a massive stretch, nor would I put it past Apple to do such a thing.
The immediate explosion of the wireless market after the removal of the jack, and its timing alongside the concurrent announcement of AirPods, that is your answer.
You absolutely can - the iPhone actually has a demo on it you can try moving your head around and the difference is extremely clear - it's not some audiophile thing.
Having wireless headphones:
Cons:
- Battery to charge
- Battery that is reduced after a few years
- Pairing with devices issues
- Lower quality of the sound due to the Bluetooth recompression
Pros: Cable doesn't get snagged when person sitting next to you gets up on the subway, ripping them out of my ears. I can connect them to my phone, tablet, tv easily and move around the house without the device.
There's perfectly valid reason to have wireless headphones.
Even around the house wireless can be an advantage. I don't mind being tethered when I'm at my desk, but I'm not always at my desk and wires running to a phone can be a real nuisance, getting snagged on drawer handles and tempting pet chewing.
I feel like most of the "must be wired" brigade check two boxes
1. Too stubborn to move on from their favorite pair of enthusiast headphones
2. Haven't actually _used_ modern wireless headphones much, if at all.
I love a pair of good Sennheisers, or Audeze, or whatever the new $2000 hotness is these days when I'm sitting at my desk, but when I'm on the go? Give me a pair o f bluetooth headphones 100% of the time. The convenience is beyond worth it IMO.
I, uh, just own both types? Actually 90% of the time the reason I use wireless buds is because I want to wear just one bud without stuff dangling, like when I'm cooking or walking my dog and I want to be aware of my surroundings.
You can't seriously list battery wear and charging and leave out the biggest annoyances with wired earphones: the cable gets tangled, and on earphones the cable is the weakest link, it's the first thing that breaks the majority of the time.
Listening to music vs participating on conference calls are separate use cases. You do not need high bandwidth Bluetooth or some other wireless standard for conference call audio.
When I'm cycling or running I cannot handle having a cable going around. Bluetooth does the job anyway.
If you care about quality of audio, then your requirements differs.
Apples loves to make something new/cool and then make it obsolete a year later. Honestly, frustrating as an Apple customer. Just when I jump to your new product you make it useless by changing something. Tech should be designed to last years, not months.
How is not supporting "24-bit/192kHz" making a headphone obsolete? I would be surprised if you can even hear a difference on any AirPods compared to "24-bit/48kHz".
Any serious blind listening tests for 256kbps AAC on specialized sites such as Hydrogenaudio puts that codec at the border of perceptibility compared to lossless.
Everything above is more deeply rooted in belief than it is in reality - or as the old adage goes: „Music fans use their equipment to listen good music. Audiophiles use good music to listen to their equipment.“
There are people in the community who claim to hear differences between digital cables using error correction as part of their protocol (HDMI).
Which Apple devices are most notable as part of the story of next-year deprecation? And won't compressed streaming still be the norm for almost everyone in the world for a very long time?
I still have not forgotten the A1234 dual dock that became useless when they released iPhone 4. Or the A1221 headset that barely worked at all and needed a separate charger after iPhone 4. Apple has a history of making accessories that are useless after 1 generation (after 1 year).
In this case, though, it's more like protecting the user from streaming higher bitrate than anyone can hear a difference in on that hardware anyway - which will help their battery life. We're talking about things like ear pods here, not a hi-fi stereo system.
They aren’t changing anything, your AirPods will still be using the same AAC codec it did when you first bought them.
Taking a step back from watching their every move or keynote is one way to keep being happy with your device, and you’ll probably find it does last years.
My Sony XM3 supports LDAC which is near-lossless and it was released a couple of years ago. No matter what you think, I can't justify a so called $600 "premium" wireless headphone not even attempt to support something close to lossless no matter how you put it. I really hope there's something Apple can do about this via software, otherwise, as an audiophile this is just full of compromises - all the way from requiring a case just to charge it, to the easy to slip from fingers design, to the smaller driver size (40mm) and now to not supporting lossless formats.
LDAC isn't lossless. The 'Hi-Resolution' ALAC files would all be lossy over it, and honestly anything else above 44.1khz that doesn't have a near flawless bluetooth connection.
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According to wikipedia, Apple did file a patent in 2019 for high bandwidth low latency audio streaming over bluetooth (up to 8mbps)[0]. Looks like they've been working on this for a while.
[0] https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0104424.html
Bluetooth and Wifi already don't properly coexist - one device can transmit a bluetooth packet and another a wifi packet at the same time, and the likelihood is both packets will get clobbered and lost. Proper coexistence would involve a device saying "I want to reserve Frequency bands X, Y and Z for the next 1 millisecond", and then no other devices using those frequency bands for that time. That exists for wifi clients, but it doesn't interoperate with Bluetooth, thread or zigbee.
It is not biologically possible for us (unless one is an alien) to hear above 22kHz. 44.1kHz is enough to record in perfect fidelity [0]. For strictly listening purposes, 192kHz/24bit is wasteful, just extreme overkill because "bigger numbers = more good".
People can't even reliably detect a difference between 320kbps MP3s and source-quality FLAC/ALAC/WAV/PCM. On very good headphone and speaker setups. Good quality MP3/AAC is all one needs for airpods and the bluetooth protocol can easily handle those bitrates.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
edit: changed record->playback. Here I'm just discussing playback; for audio production purposes 192kHz/24bit is desireable for several reasons. Once one ships that album/song though, it should be downmixed back to 44.1kHz/16bit.
Have you ever been in a room with a DJ playing low quality music on a decent sound system? It's awful, grating. Now at least your everyday aspiring DJ has access to higher bitrate tunes and doesn't need to blast low quality junk out of the PA system.
For me the holy grail is USB-C powered earbuds with active noise cancelling.
That way I don't have to worry about battery running out either.
I often work for 10+ hours and 4 hours of battery on AirPods pro frustrates me when I have to regularly charge them during the day.
Then with USB-C could also get superior audio quality than Bluetooth.
I'm considering getting the Bose QC20 as a compromise. But still... they're also somewhat battery dependent.
They also have a pretty light clamping force compared to most over ear headphones I have or have used, so even with glasses they’re quite comfortable to wear all day.
And if the batteries do run out, they still work as headphones (sans ANC) with a cable.
The QC20 kinda seem like the worst of all worlds for me. Wired so you’ve got cables to catch on things, battery-dependant, in-ear…
Fantastic audio quality, and I can plug my headphones practically every audio device manufactured in the past 100 years (except for the iPhone).
Samsung makes these. ANC is certainly not Bose/Sony quality, but I've heard they're decent.
Well you're in luck because Huawei, Samsung and Razer make these things.
I mean, surely all those audiophile testers were aware that they are listening to compressed music? Or is this a recent realisation?
Bluetooth reminds me a lot of the F-35: Designed to do everything, does none of it particularly well, hard to build/maintain, and frankly would have been better off as three or four competing standards that did their "thing" well and nothing else.
Might be time to retire it, do a clean sheet audio-only standard, that is easy enough to implement/re-implement with actual tests for all the functionality.
Hard disagree. Bluetooth has an important disadvantage, in that its quality is bad. But it's also got an important advantage: it works, at all.
Basically anything made from early 00s onwards will be able to connect to a modern pair of Bluetooth headphones. Interop is the selling feature.
LE is a cleanroom specification developed by Nokia and delivered wholesale to the Bluetooth SIG in 2010. It's much more limited in scope, limited in bandwidth and designed to fill a niche around low-power, low-bandwidth devices instead of F-35'ing with WiFi-type capabilities.
It'll get faster in time - each new revision brings with it a faster PHY without compromising on power consumption. It's up to about 2Mbits/sec now, as of 5.0. It's not quite up to where it needs to be to support streaming high-fidelity lossless audio, but it'll be there shortly. It's the right tool for the job - for once - we just need to let it mature a bit.
[edit] Double-checking how AirPods connect, but I'm almost confident it's analogous to LE Audio spec in 5.1
The F-35 is not one airplane. It's three. The fact that these airplanes share technology and components is a good thing.
The claim that the F-35 is bad because it's a multi-role aircraft is unfounded. Multi role combat aircraft are the standard. Here's a partial list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multirole_combat_aircraft#Acti...
The claim that the F-35 is inferior to single role aircraft like the F-22 is also unfounded. None of us knows the specifics about the two airplanes but we do know that the F-35 has superior weapon systems, durability, communications, and spatial awareness.
There are planned upgrades to make the F-22 compatible with the max off boresight capability of the AIM-9X, with its future LOAL capabilities, and there are plans to coat it with more durable radar reflective "paint". The F-35 has all of those today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor#Up...
But the most important proof that the F-35 is a good airplane is that there are so many customers lining up to buy it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Deleted Comment
I'll skip the whole debate about how good perceptual lossy encodings actually are these days and whether any person could reasonably expect to hear that measured difference, but just wanted to clarify that the sample rate of the headphones' built-in ADC shouldn't be conflated with the lossless codec.
Deleted Comment
A funny thing I‘d do if I had more time and energy to dedicate to the topic of Bluetooth telephony (HSP and HFP are garbage for arbitrary reasons) would be opening a network and doing reasonable quality telephony over it to demonstrate it‘s possible.
Deleted Comment
In anecdotal data, I noticed that my Bluetooth headphones had latency so bad they were not usable for gaming (CS:GO, Valorant). Switching the codec to aptX reduced latency noticable but also dramatically reduced quality to somewhere similar to a phone call (flat, noisy).
So that's my assumption.
Dead Comment
The headphones should have gigs of buffer and be able to manage lossless with a great UX to support this.
People are already used to buffer waits for streaming video and this is already a niche use case.
I don't expect it, but I truly hope the next iPhone has a headphone jack. People want airpods whether or not their phones have headphone jacks, it was insecure to take it away in the first place. Have some faith in your products.
On the plus side, I often get to pick the music in my friends' cars.
The MagSafe charger kind of solves this, since it's at least easy to pick up with the charger attached, but MagSafe chargers are more expensive than Lightning cables, and the official one has a very short cord.
In my dream world, the iPhone would have two Lightning (or USB-C) ports, but I don't expect that to ever happen.
Are you suggesting that Apple removed the jack in order to sell AirPods? Seems a bit cynical and doesn't even make sense. I think they removed it for engineering and design reasons. If you need it back there's an official adapter that costs just a few dollars.
In my mind this isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just what you'd expect from a competent company. If nobody in the decision-making process to remove the headphone jack asked how it would affect long-term AirPod sales, then that just seems like a pretty big oversight on their part, doesn't it?
Spotify bought podcasts so it tie them to a DRM-encumbered platform with ads, Facebook bought Oculus so it could monetize the data, consoles remove disk drives in part to drive digital purchases and cut down on game reselling, iMessage is iPhone exclusive because it makes it harder to switch to Android, and Apple cares about influencing long-term consumer trends in the headphone market. I don't necessarily agree that acknowledging this stuff counts as being cynical.
Deleted Comment
There are probably some special cases where you may hear the difference, but it wouldn't be significant.
If you want to listen to music in highest possible quality, AirPods are for sure the wrong device. Probably also the AirPods Max.
You would use some very high end wired sound system or headphones, to get a very small difference for a lot of money :)
You absolutely can - the iPhone actually has a demo on it you can try moving your head around and the difference is extremely clear - it's not some audiophile thing.
Pros: - No cable
I'll keep my cable headphones :)
There's perfectly valid reason to have wireless headphones.
1. Too stubborn to move on from their favorite pair of enthusiast headphones 2. Haven't actually _used_ modern wireless headphones much, if at all.
I love a pair of good Sennheisers, or Audeze, or whatever the new $2000 hotness is these days when I'm sitting at my desk, but when I'm on the go? Give me a pair o f bluetooth headphones 100% of the time. The convenience is beyond worth it IMO.
You can't seriously list battery wear and charging and leave out the biggest annoyances with wired earphones: the cable gets tangled, and on earphones the cable is the weakest link, it's the first thing that breaks the majority of the time.
For me, being able to walk around my house while doing a conference on my computer, or go to the fridge/oven while I'm on Discord, is a big sell.
Sure I have some higher quality wired equipment, but wireless is incredibly convenient.
The only time that Bluetooth gives me issue is with my 2014 vehicle.
Everything above is more deeply rooted in belief than it is in reality - or as the old adage goes: „Music fans use their equipment to listen good music. Audiophiles use good music to listen to their equipment.“
There are people in the community who claim to hear differences between digital cables using error correction as part of their protocol (HDMI).
Taking a step back from watching their every move or keynote is one way to keep being happy with your device, and you’ll probably find it does last years.