AirPods Max Won't Directly Support Lossless Apple Music Over Lightning
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ignatius345
macrumors G3
That's my hunch, too. Read a great piece about it from a few years ago over on Ars Technica.
I think in a lot of listening situations and with a lot of source material and equipment, Lossless is going to be hard to appreciate fully. Audiophiles with trained ears and great headphones, sure -- but for average folks with average equipment I don't think it's going to jump out at you the way Spatial Audio will on tracks mixed for it. It's just very hard to miss! Now I just hope they figure out how to bring it to Apple TV...
ignatius345
macrumors G3
I'm in the set of APM owners who definitely knew what lossless audio was, but also am not losing any sleep over its apparently not being supported.
I do think that, marketing-wise, it's a pretty weird omission on what was billed as a flagship pair of headphones that has an optional wired connection. Nobody who knows much about audio would expect lossless audio over bluetooth, but as a consumer I think it's reasonable to expect support for it when plugged in.
Lemon Olive
Suspended
Yes, there is. No one is getting lossless out of 3.5 mm jack. All headphones made for lossless audio on iPhone use the Lightning port, which is the only thing capable of 24-bit output.
Lemon Olive
Suspended
I'm 8000% certain of that.
scuac
macrumors regular
What nonsense is this? AirPods Pro for sure work for input and output, is this a problem with the non-pro version? I doubt that is a Bluetooth limitation.
rlhamil
macrumors 6502
That pinout is wrong. See .https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-newly-published-patent-applications.1580549/ (also lots of other sites; anything more official requires being a signed-up MFi. From what various say, the lane 0 and 1 connectors are the same immediately above and below the two sides (i.e. swapped order on the other side), and the device (socket) side switches to accommodate.
I haven't read it exhaustively, but it seems likely that both lane 0 and lane 1 are bidirectional, so it's not as if one is left and the other right (for audio), nor one audio out (samples interlaced) and the other audio in. Indeed, there are stereo microphone adapters for Lightning connector iPhones.
So AFAIK, no analog signal goes out the Lightning socket. In the case of the 30-pin to Lightning adapter (30 pin does have analog outputs), the adapter has a DAC that converts them to digital. Probably every Lightning cable or dongle has one or more chips in it.
RickInHouston
macrumors 65816
Lossless / CD Redbook quality is great. Really don't like anything lower - listening fatigue sets in after awhile. High resolution.?.
You need some REALLY good kit to convince me it's a thing. Benchmark HPA4 amp / Benchmark DAC-3 / Audeze LCD-4 headphone. I can't tell a difference. I think it's my 60 year old ears.
You need some REALLY good kit to convince me it's a thing. Benchmark HPA4 amp / Benchmark DAC-3 / Audeze LCD-4 headphone. I can't tell a difference. I think it's my 60 year old ears.
honglong1976
macrumors 68000
I bought a pair of Beats Solo Pro for £100. You paid £500 for a pair of AirPods Max.
We are both unable to play lossless.
£400 saved
We are both unable to play lossless.
£400 saved
Lemon Olive
Suspended
I should clarify. The 3.5mm does not have an implicit limitation. The amp and DAC do. On iPhone, you cannot get 24-bit audio out of the 3.5mm jack.
alfonsog
macrumors 6502a
I bought the AirPods Max for the noise cancellation knowing that Bluetooth would never be lossless or hires. It works great on airplanes, busses, trains, and listening to music with my wall a/c on. I also have some wired sennneisers with a headphone amp for headphone hires listening, a sacd player hi-fi setup for listening to my cd and sacd’s, and for blasting loud music I have a stereo pair of Sonos play 5’s with a sub. Otherwise I listen to real live music when I play my piano or play viola in my symphony or attend symphony concerts with no speakers at all 😂
dumastudetto
macrumors 603
Lossless mastered for Apple Music is going to change the industry forever.
Every product released by Apple is planned years ahead. They knew they would release this new Lossless format but still released overpriced headphones that can’t reproduce it even through Lightning.
Another pleb making assumptions. Next.If you think the AirPod Max is expensive, then you are not the target market for lossless nor high res audio either. So why even complain? 128kbps mp3 will be good enough for you.
starman111
macrumors member
So many people here are complaining about their first world problems. Apple added a free new feature that nobody saw coming, and nobody expected when they purchased their last set of headphones. Most people don't even have the hearing to notice the difference of lossless audio. Yet...there are so many complaints.
This reminds me of the Louis C.K. comedy bit about cell phones and air travel. Search for "Louis CK - Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy." You'll laugh.
Plus, Spacial Audio will be a lovely new feature that most of us can enjoy, and frankly it'll be a much more noticeable than lossless audio.
This reminds me of the Louis C.K. comedy bit about cell phones and air travel. Search for "Louis CK - Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy." You'll laugh.
Plus, Spacial Audio will be a lovely new feature that most of us can enjoy, and frankly it'll be a much more noticeable than lossless audio.
Well, then to quote Steve Jobs from D8:
"They're paying us to make those choices. That's what a lot of customers pay us to do."
So if a group of customers expect a truly top-tier solution from Apple, that's because Apple has set the bar that high over decades. One example: I happen to be extremely satisfied with AirPods Max because I know it is absolutely on a different level, especially if you are someone who is into hardware internals and see how mind-bogglingly engineered it is, literally every piece of it, metal or plastic or fabric, so much so that some do call it over-engineered.
So when I keep seeing and owning products like this, I naturally don't want to be disappointed. Nothing wrong with that.
If people didn't react like this, we would all still be using MBPs with butterfly keyboards right now.
Butterfly keyboards are defective design.
Meanwhile, nothing’s wrong with the AirPods Max.
It’s different when you expect something that is not there to begin with.
TheOldProfessor
macrumors newbie
A lot of confusion about this. Here are a few facts. True lossless "Hi-Res" is 24-bit/192Khz--that means 24 bits of information is sampled from the source material, 192 thousand times a second. CD-quality is 24-bit/44.1Khz. To stream CD-quality wirelessly you need a bitrate of 1.4Mbps. Bluetooth 5.0, used by Apple's AirPods Max (APM) can stream content at up to 2Mbs--so, in theory, the APM could stream CD-quality. Unfortunately, though, the APM's built-in DAC (digital to audio converter) incorporates Apple's legacy AAC music compression "codec," and is, therefore, capable of processing only 256kbps--far less than the 1.4 Mbps which is required for CD-quality, and miles off the 9.2 Mbps which is required for true lossless. As for the iPhone, its built-in DAC can process 24-bit/48Khz content, but "talks" only to the internal speakers. Apple's Lightning-to-3.5mm jack has its own built-in DAC--which is also 24-bit/48Khz. So when you connect a pair of analog, non-bluetooth, headphones to your iPhone using the jack, you can listen to CD-quality content. However, when you connect the AirPods Max to this jack, using a cable, the APM takes the analog signal it receives from the 3.5mm pin, and processes it through its own, onboard DAC, which downsamples the incoming signal to 256kps. This is also true for the AirPods Pro and the HomePod. Thus to listen to CD-quality content on AppleMusic, you'll need to either physically connect a pair of analog headphones to your iPhone, or stream content from your iPhone to a device (hopefully on the same wifi network) that has a high-end DAC, such as the BlueSound PowerNode. To stream CD-quality music to an Apple device, we'll have to wait for new hardware.
Earlier today, we confirmed that AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max will not support lossless audio over Bluetooth because of Bluetooth limitations, and it turns out there's no direct wired lossless option for the AirPods Max either.
Apple's AirPods Max headphones are equipped with a Lightning port, but it is limited to analog sources and will not natively support digital audio formats in wired mode.
Apple told The Verge that when a 24-bit/48 kHz Apple Music lossless track is played to an iPhone into the AirPods Max using a Lightning cable and a Lightning-to-3.5mm dongle, the audio is converted to analog and then re-digitized to 24-bit/48 kHz. The re-digitization is not an identical match to the source and Apple is not able to say that it's lossless audio.
Apple has confirmed that lossless audio can be listened to on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV, but the higher quality audio is not available on AirPods, AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max. Apple lossless is also not available on the HomePod.
Listening to lossless audio on an iOS device will require wired headphones compatible with the ALAC format, and possibly a digital to analog converter. That the $549 AirPods Max do not work with Apple lossless is sure to upset some fans, but there is debate about whether most people can even tell the difference between standard and lossless audio formats.
Though the AirPods Max headphones do not support lossless audio, they are compatible with Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos, another new feature that Apple is bringing to Apple Music. Spatial AudioA will allow artists to create multidimensional music that sounds like it's coming from all around you, and this feature is available on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip.
Article Link: AirPods Max Won't Directly Support Lossless Apple Music Over Lightning
ErikGrim
macrumors 604
Congratulations. This is the most wrong post on this website. Amazing.
This is a slippery slope. I know I will sound like an ass for saying it, but if you have to ask, chasing high res lossless is not worth the effort. You will hear the benefit of the Apple Music source being lossless over the current 256kbs streams with anything you plug into your iPad or MacBook.
But if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, I would start with a Schitt Modi $99 (DAC), Schitt Magni $99 (Amp), and a Audeze LCD-1 $399 (of you like bass) to the Hifiman HE400i $449 (if you like neutral.) For the iPad, you need to add a Camera Adapter USB kit $39. About the same as a pair of AirPod Max with a hell of a lot less convenience and no wireless or spatial audio.
For the ATH-M50xBT, get a 1/4" headphone cable and plug into the Magni.
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