AirPods, AirPods Max and AirPods Pro Don't Support Apple Music Lossless Audio

[deevey]

Seems like Apple has plenty of software work to do… shame to see them wasting resources on features that won’t benefit… hardly anyone for… 5 years.

It's a free upgrade that will benefit anyone who has even a modest DAC/Headphone/Speaker combo.

So how is it wasteful on resources? The only thing it's costing them is bandwidth. They potentially gain millions of Tidal/Spotify customers who are currently either paying more than AM / Still waiting for lossless respectively.

 

[ErikGrim]

I have B&W PX via BT AptX that run at 24bit 48kHz but the brand new AirPods Max don't. What a joke. Apple needs to adopt AptX already or develop a codec that can run 24bit 48kHz or higher.

Yes, compressed down to 420Kbit

 

[ErikGrim]

I don’t know if there will be updates to iTunes to support 192/24 and 96/24 but I’m guessing there will be??

iTunes has always supported high res audio.

 

[EricNau]

It's a free upgrade that will benefit anyone who has even a modest DAC/Headphone/Speaker combo.

So how is it wasteful on resources? The only thing it's costing them is bandwidth. They potentially gain millions of Tidal/Spotify customers who are currently either paying more than AM / Still waiting for lossless respectively.

Apple’s resources, i.e. employees’ time and effort, which is limited.

Sure, from a marketing perspective it might make sense. But the topic of this very article is how few customers will actually be able to take advantage of lossless (or have the interest).

Lossless is a very niche market, and requires equipment that most Apple customers do not own. And when basic performance is still an issue, if the purpose is to remain competitive, I can’t help but feel Apple should prioritize the latter.

 

[JustSomebody12]

As far as I can understand it Lossless isn't supported because of the low bandwidth of Bluetooth (if I am wrong correct me please).

But couldn't some company produce some wireless headphones which use a higher-bandwidth technology (such as WiFi or UWB)?

I ask for curiosity...

 

[vlone]

As far as I can understand it Lossless isn't supported because of the low bandwidth of Bluetooth (if I am wrong correct me please).

But couldn't some company produce some wireless headphones which use a higher-bandwidth technology (such as WiFi or UWB)?

I ask for curiosity...

Yep, they could. I think in general some type of wireless (2.4ghz) protocol is superior to Bluetooth in most meaningful ways but the downside is that you will either need an adapter or a certain device to support it. The latency is way lower, it can support way higher bandwidth, supports farther distances, etc.

 

[jinnyman]

What's the point of going lossless if vast sector of their profit sectors including iphones and ipads are unable to play lossless without a dongle and 3rd party wired earphone?

Perhaps some kind of wifi based connection supporting lossless?

 

[iSayuSay]

Maybe with the official Apple Music lossless announcement, there will be a few new headphones (Beats/AirPods) that somehow magically support the new format over bluetooth?

 

[behringer]

Lossless is a very niche market, and requires equipment that most Apple customers do not own.

We've had lossless audio on Apple devices for over 30 years.

But yes, lossless audio now requires a headphone socket, something which a lot of apple customers no longer own.

 

[ebernet]

iTunes does support 24/96kHz ALAC and have been doing that for a long time. Not sure if it did all the way since the inception of ALAC, but not long after.

I said Apple Music files, not my ALAC files I have in there. Will the iTunes app (the one that has not been upgraded in years) be able to play back cloud resident files at high Res like the music App will. I am fully aware it will play files in its library that way, but will the music in the cloud portion of iTunes work with lossless audio on my 2008 Mac Pro.

 

[ebernet]

I'm betting it's a disconnect from the tech and engineers and the PR people at Apple you see quoted in these articles. The $9 Apple lightning to 3.5mm dongle should be capable of up to 24bit/192kHz audio.

We've tried the Apple Lightning to Headphone Jack adaptor!

The iPhone 7 arrived without the jack input, but it does come with an adaptor cord featuring a Lightning connector and a 3.5mm jack entry. You can also buy the adaptor as an accessory to use with any Apple smartphone or iPad.

www.qobuz.com

It'd be quite odd that they would force you to use a 3rd party DAC/amp when their own $9 version should suffice.

As for wireless, if the internal hardware could physically support it, I'm betting on a firmware update for existing W1/H1 headphones to have ALAC via the ultra wideband chip. For CD quality lossless ALAC, you're looking at less than 1Mbps, and UWB should be capable of hundreds of megabits.

Everything you need to know about Ultra Wideband in the iPhone 12 and HomePod mini | AppleInsider

Apple has added its U1 chip to even more products, and is clearly planning to make Ultra Wideband a major feature of its device ecosystem? Here's a breakdown of UWB, what it does now, and what it can do for you.

appleinsider.com

Yeah, the DAC chip in that adapter supports 24x192, but I doubt that's what Apple had in mind when they said external USB DACs

UPDATE: Given latest tech note, they support 24x48 in that cable. Yes the chip is capable of more, but they only enabled it at 24x48. Anyway you slice it though a $9 cable to get 24x48 out to a nice pair of wired headphones is sweet!

 

[ebernet]

Will wired Apple CarPlay support lossless does anyone know

I don't know but good question. My head unit supports up to 24x192 FLACs on SD cards and USB drives. AFAIK it only supports 24x96 ALAC, but whether those will work over the lightening to USB is a good question (and will my 5 year old Pioneer AVIX 8100 actually support it over the USB from the iPhone)

 

[ebernet]

No, because USB to Lightning is digital.

NO IDEA what you are trying to say here lol. Lightening is a connector. Everything coming out of your iPhone is digital now - when they got rid of the 30 pin connector they got rid of the analog output terminals. If you have a 24x96 or 24x192 DAC is in your head unit (like mine is, the Pioneer AVIX 8100), and the phone is using the lightening cable to send it the 24x96 data over USB to the head Unit to play it, then we are all good - as long as the software in the head unit is recent enough to talk to the phone properly. As apple says, to get the hi res audio you must have an EXTERNAL DAC connected over USB.

 

[Celtic-moniker]

Dear me. True audiophiles everywhere are in tears of laughter reading some of the self-indignant and grossly ignorant comments in this discussion.
The hilarity... Sheer hilarity of complaining that their device couldn’t do something it couldn’t do yesterday that you didn’t care for until someone told you can’t!
Ohhhh putty ye, the self appointed expert who probably never could tell the difference but says they can, and knows, says, rants that it’s all because Apple’s fault blah blah blah.
And holy cow my friends... You mob sulking about the removal of the headphone Jack… ooooh wow. If you had any real knowledge you would be aware that the Jack wasn’t a balanced headphone connector anyway, and Can’t support high ohm headphones.
But hey… let’s wave that LDAC flag like we know what it means.
let me know when you get your first open back headphones, or want to stop complaining that you have finally realised your BMW isn’t a supercar…. Just because someone finally told you that it wasn’t.

 

[dannys1]

iPhone is able to serve Airplay2 or wireless CarPlay using wifi for hours. There are portable Airplay devices available.
I'd say it would be possible to design headphones if they can be as heavy as AirPods Max with enough battery life for wireless lossless HD audio (wi-fi) support.

iPhone is a large device with wifi built in - you're not getting wifi built into headphones with tiny batteries. Even if you could do it, it wouldn't be worth the expensive and janky implementation for something you wouldn't ever hear anyway.

 

[AJTC]

If they’re not giving us lossless could they at least increase the standard 256kbps to 320kbps? If for no other reason than some of their non-Apple Digital Master tracks could do with being re-encoded because some of those tracks sound awful compared to ones I’ve ripped from the CD myself. And of course because they match I end up listening to those low quality ones everywhere other than my MacBook.

 

[Roadster Lewis]

I develop high end car audio systems - it will not matter if lossless is supported or not. You will not notice, a car is a terrible place to listen to music if you want to hear all of the details - there’s the road/engine/wind noise, all sorts of hard surfaces to reflect sounds about and not to mention you should be paying attention to driving, rather than listening intricate details in the music.

In general, I think this is all a lot of fuss over something that will be of little difference to most people. Those who want the simplicity of wireless headphones need not apply, and out of the people listening with DACs and wired headphones a large proportion will not be able to hear the difference anyway (try doing an ABX test to see if you can).

 

[KennyJr]

Okay, it looks like the advantage for Apple products here is the gain of spacial audio. Lossless audio on the other hand will allow Apple Music to catch up with the competition. Now I have reason to subscribe to Apple Music (currently using Qobuz). For Apple enthusiasts who are truly into high quality audio (I plead guilty), this upgrade is a real plus. I get the spacial audio for my Apple stuff and the lossless audio and high resolution audio for my other audio equipment. Today's Apple announcement for me freed up money reserved for Apple stuff to instead get an improved driver for my best headphones (Stax).

 

[Mr.PT]

No kidding.

Hilarious that people thought they were going to listen to lossless audio via Bluetooth.

Almost as hilarious as people touting the superior audio performance of the Max over it’s half price competitors...not even going into the ecosystem easygoing...

 

[Mr.PT]

Actually I'd love to see an iPhone with a very nice DAC built in and headphone jack. It would be an instant purchase for me.

Apple Music edition [will come with one year Apple Music HiRes subscription]

 

[saschke]

Lossless formats notwithstanding, the AirPods Max do sound fantastic for all that matters. This is coming from someone who's owned expensive DACs and custom in-ear-monitors.

 

[Karnicopia]

Overall what you have is a service given away for free that is pretty big news for the people that would actually use it but it absolutely pisses of everyone that really isn’t going to get any benefit out of it. I have a desktop headphone setup and people spend significant money on Roon and Tidal/Qobuz to just stream lossless audio and manage content and Apple may have nuked that completely and utterly at no additional cost. If I could ditch two subscriptions for one I already have that is not increasing in price it’s huge and to me that’s really what happened here.

The AirPods thing looks bad I guess but I have a headphone desk set up and as people are saying it isn’t easy to hear the difference with high res, you need highly resolving equipment even if you could. High res just has nothing to do with wireless headphones at this point they have completely different purposes. Even if Apple could get the signal to play the speakers they manufacture aren’t good enough to hear the difference and the only real difference is you would use way more data battery and lose range. That isn’t even really a valid trade off to make if they could.

Combine the two and it’s an interesting situation where they basically get blasted for providing a pretty massive service for free for the people that use it but it just infuriates everyone else. That’s kind of a crazy situation to walk into but I’m just glad they did because I may be able to drop two subscriptions at no cost.

I also have APM and I am interested in spatial audio and that is going to be way more recognizable on something like the max and is actually something computationally Apple can do that others can’t really compete at. I was actually hoping for this because I was shocked how good it sounded for movies and it will be interesting seeing what it does with imaging and soundstage with music. Audiophiles will absolutely hate that one because it goes against preserving what the artist intended but Apple just did it with computational photography so I don’t particularly doubt them on computational audio. I think this part is pretty exciting but gets buried a bit by the other news but I actually like both updates.

 

[Abazigal]

If it’s free, I don’t see what the fuss is when you aren’t losing anything from this.

 

[nathansz]

My paired dual homepods connected to my mac await this update with eagerness.

no lossless audio for you. besides they aren’t good enough speakers anyways

 

[SurferPup]

I would assume that lossless audio will not transmit via the lightning cable plugged into my Apple CarPlay units from reading this article. I find it exciting that lossless audio is coming to  Music as I anticipate Apple are researching creation of a Bluetooth codec that will be able to transmit lossless audio for a future generation of AirPods.