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Apple Engineer Addresses Lack of Lossless Support on New AirPods Pro
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no, people who truly care about getting the best quality out of an audio file are using WAV or AIFF
This is so silly. Almost no AirPods users cared about the lack of lossless audio support before it was added to Apple Music (probably that most of them didn’t even know what lossless was), and now they act like if it was a deal breaker feature.
Almost no one will be able to tell the difference, especially on AirPods, and even so, the files are so large that I don’t see anyone streaming lossless music for the marginal benefit in audio quality.
Almost no one will be able to tell the difference, especially on AirPods, and even so, the files are so large that I don’t see anyone streaming lossless music for the marginal benefit in audio quality.
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You can ask for lossless all you want, but the fact remains that (1)bluetooth as of the current state does not have enough bandwidth to support lossless (2) if it somehow supports lossless (LDAC is not really lossless, btw) it will devour battery life and (3) about 95% of listeners cannot distinguish between AAC and ALAC.
Conceivably, if wifi direct or something like that could be fit into AirPods Pro, then it could support lossless, but it will probably make it far more bulkier.
People should be fine with AirPods Pro not having lossless capability. Instead, people should be chastising Apple for not including lossless capabilities on AirPods Max.
Conceivably, if wifi direct or something like that could be fit into AirPods Pro, then it could support lossless, but it will probably make it far more bulkier.
People should be fine with AirPods Pro not having lossless capability. Instead, people should be chastising Apple for not including lossless capabilities on AirPods Max.
“Pro” is simply just a marketing term for “better”, not sure why people like to look into it more than that.
No one is using AirPods of any kind, or any wireless headphones for that matter, if they’re actually working on or with “pro” audio.
The AirPods Max can play up to 24 bit 48 kHz files with the cable.
Only reason Apple refuses to call it “lossless” is because it’s been converted from analog to digital and back to analog, but it’s still 24/48, and it’s a lot closer to lossless than the 256kbps AAC when going wireless
Double-blind tests show over and over that almost nobody can distinguish bitrates that high.
Absolutely not exaggerating, ANC was really, really great until ....
The APP Gen-1 were very capable of providing great ANC, downright amazing for earbuds. Until Apple killed their own product and USP. Now coming up with "doubly better" ANC in APP Gen-2 is ... ugh.
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Apple has to have higher resolution “lossless” on the next AirPods Max. No exceptions. No excuses.
Definition of an audiophile: Someone who listens to their equipment and not the music.
Care to mention any other Bluetooth wireless product that currently does?
I would love to use streaming, but as a supplement to my personal library. Not a replacement.
I’m fairly certain there is something like the device you describe, there are all kinds of DAPs out there. I know people mod out old iPods with SSDs and custom firmware. Modern DAPs tend to accept microSDs which are coming in ever larger capacities.
But I’m not sure I really want to carry 2 devices. The entire idea of carrying one device that was a cellphone + iPod was the entire thing that got me hyped for a so-called “iPhone” in 2006 when such a device was only rumored and we didn’t have so much as a hint of what else it might be capable of. Nothing can hold my full library, but my 1TB 14 Pro Max is definitely a bit more spacious than the 60GB iPod Video I retired in June of 2007.
BlueTooth doesn’t do “lossless”. AirPods Max needs something else for higher resolution ”lossless”.
Yeah for convenience I go with Apple. If I want superior sound I use other options. More often than not I’m looking for convenience these days. Lol kind of makes Apple the fast food option I guess.
Luxury brand without luxury audio - Fail. Kind of like Ferrari offering a 200MPH car that only does 150....
Especially as incoming Android phones have a new "almost" lossless codec arriving now in AptX Lossless.
Bugs me no end I have to use two other devices for decent mobile audio... My A&K SR25 and Melomanias or XM4s.
Plus if apple arcade is a thing we aint even talked about it's latency vs this new CODEC.
Especially as incoming Android phones have a new "almost" lossless codec arriving now in AptX Lossless.
Bugs me no end I have to use two other devices for decent mobile audio... My A&K SR25 and Melomanias or XM4s.
Plus if apple arcade is a thing we aint even talked about it's latency vs this new CODEC.
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No, not at all. I have audio products and Apple is not on my short list. But as someone who has worked in engineering throughout my professional life, I know the smell of management BS, just like cheap solder!
Apple isn't luxury and it's pretty well known if you are in the group of uses who want perfection from their audio, iphones are not the product for you. iphones and other apple devices provide audio that is generally more than acceptable to the masses, not the perfectionists.
ALAC’s shortcomings are well documented, I can’t be bothered to really go indepth on any of these things for the millionth time, but compared to FLAC, ALAC is less efficient, less secure, less supported outside of the apple ecosystem, less adopted by the consumers who are actually willing to build a personal music library, and has less safeguards against data corruption whereas FLAC is an archival grade format designed with data integrity in mind. ALAC was only ever designed as a proprietary Apple format to lock people into their ecosystem.
There’s no legitimate reason anyone would ever willingly use it if presented with the option of ALAC or FLAC. But here we are, 2022 and Apple gives you the middle finger if you even think of dragging a FLAC file into iTunes to sync it to your iPhone.
The equivalent of this would be if in 2005 apple gave MP3 users the middle finger and forced everyone to convert to their own format just to hear their music.
Unfortunately the Apple sycophants will tell you how easy it is to “just convert your FLAC to ALAC, they’re both LOSSLESS!!!” Without realizing that there other considerations to using a file format besides it’s ability to store lossless audio. The answer should not be to convert, it should be to ask the trillion dollar megacorporation to do better.
Right now the only thing ALAC has doing for it is that it plays nice in apple land. That’s it. No reason FLAC couldn’t do the same, it’s by their choice that it doesn’t. But then there’d be nothing special about ALAC anymore.
Wrong. This isn’t a quality issue, all these formats are containers for unaltered PCM audio. But keeping your audio in uncompressed formats would be idiotic and put you at even more of a disadvantage over using ALAC.
The AirPods came out in 2016. Apple Music didn’t go lossless until what, 2021?
That’s a solid 5 years I’ve been caring about AirPods running on a low fidelity wireless standard, which was never forced on you by the wired earbuds they are supposedly an improvement from. They are a lower quality product than that which they are meant to replace.
1. I have an unlimited data plan, so streaming large files is not of concern to me,
2. There is no streaming involved with locally stored files like I would prefer anyway.
3. Your average TikTok video, which people stream all day on iPhones, has a larger file size than a typical standard-res lossless track.
4. If you’re so concerned about data usage, ask why the trillion dollar tech company is using a relatively inefficient compression standard for their lossless audio with unnecessarily larger file sizes compared to FLAC
Somebody please tell Esge Anderson to stop messing with the audio quality and start working to make the AirPods quickly connect to the iPhone when inserting them in your ears and taking a call. I am so tired of the “Hello, hello…are you there? Hello? Hello? Oh, there you are. Sorry about that, it’s these damn AirPods…”. And what has happened to automatic switching from the phone to the iPad or to the Apple TV? This almost never works correctly. Finally, a couple times per week, I have one Airpod that just doesn’t want to work when I insert it. All of the above worked great after the original AirPods Pro came out but it’s gone downhill ever since. I am using a 14Pro and APP2. Get it together Apple!
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I can't recall Apple ever talking about reliability of wireless audio is their core priority
"It's been proven numerous times that 4k is pretty much indistinguishable from a good quality 720p file; certainly in this kind of equipment.
It would just be a waste of bandwidth."
