I thought that Apple couldn't possibly let the original Airpods suffer from the horrible audio quality that afflicts bi-directional bluetooth audio. I was wrong.
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Apple Engineer Addresses Lack of Lossless Support on New AirPods Pro
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Same kind of clueless people that said that their vhs tapes were fine and that dvd was a gimmick. Then they said dvds were fine and HD was a gimmick. Don’t listen to these people.
Hopefully lossless support comes soon.
To start, yes I have the AirPods Max and cable.
And as you said, it’s higher quality than Bluetooth, 24-bit 48 kHz to be precise.
As for coming anywhere close to 24-bit 48 kHz over Bluetooth, fat chance.
Apple might be able to make some cool things, but going from AAC/256 up to 24/48 over a wireless connection, while keeping the exact same reliability, latency and battery as exists right now is impossible.
Almost every attempt at a lossless wireless protocol has either failed or had major compromises made, Apple isn’t magic.
If you need higher quality that bad, plug in the cable.
As for spatial audio, it doesn’t even matter because that’s not lossless.
The Dolby Atmos files that Apple Music, Amazon music and Tidal use are lossy.
Lossless standard 7.1.4 Atmos mixes are absolutely massive, and are usually only available on physical media like Blu-ray.
I don’t think anyone is arguing against lossless.
If Apple could create a wireless standard that could completely reliably transfer a fully lossless 5+ minute audio file with the exact same performance as they currently get with AAC, I would be all for it.
But they can’t.
So they’ve got two options, spend the next several years perfecting iy till they can get it absolutely right, or rush out an unreliable battery Hogg of a feature that one percent of their customers will use.
I’ll take the second.
What's funny is that it seems like the majority of people who make music, even mainstream music, do not care about lossless at all.
FLAC can contain an MD5 checksum of the audiostream embedded as meta tag.
So if you fear your storage got corrupted, you can always verify the integrity of the audio whereas with ALAC you are bound to more complex scans (like the File Integrity Verifier plugin for foobar2000).
Imho, that’s the main difference between FLAC and ALAC (besides older/specific devices only supporting one of the two formats).
There is not much reason to badmouth ALAC per se but it is just redundant. I don‘t know of any technical superiority of ALAC over FLAC.
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Blutooth is a ********.
CD quality lossless takes around 150kb/s. With flac or alac, you need around 75kb/s. Too much data for BT.
Tried my first music over BT in 2005ish, and the sound quality was abysmal. Nowadays it went to acceptable.
I really hope apple pioneers this sector, I would probably get airpods then.
CD quality lossless takes around 150kb/s. With flac or alac, you need around 75kb/s. Too much data for BT.
Tried my first music over BT in 2005ish, and the sound quality was abysmal. Nowadays it went to acceptable.
I really hope apple pioneers this sector, I would probably get airpods then.
False. I can tell the difference when I edit high-resolution sound files of jazz, classical, etc. I can create an mp3 file, and easily distinguish it from the original lossless file when using high-quality headphones or monitors.
Of course, it depends on a number of factors.
If the source material is garbage, it won't really matter if product is lossless or lossy. GIGO.
There is source material that isn't garbage but that still work fairly well when compressed. It may just not be very demanding of the resources.
If you listen through tinny speakers or budget earbuds, then it'll all sound mediocre. That's where your "certainly in this kind of equipment" may have some validity.
There is a delay when using Bluetooth earbuds. It's unimportant when listening casually to music or a podcast. It's unacceptable if trying to perform to a click track or prerecorded material.
I use high-quality equipment when I listen critically. I use first generation AirPod Pros when my needs are less critical.
Finally: Apple still can't deliver lossless sound wirelessly, and it deleted the earphone jack how many years ago? Really? I have a dongle plugged into my iPhone 7 right this moment, so that I can use high-quality analogue headphones with it.
Because lossless has been the standard for almost two decades on mobile devices. Back in the days apple introduced alac on their ipod and other manufacturers had flac support.
Later people started using bt headphones as the quality became less abysmal.
And nowadays there are people seriously protesting having bt earpieces that fit 2008 consumer standards?
I remember back in the later 90ies/early 2000s, when people where producing "high quality MP3s" and there were so many options in the mp3 encoder to tune for and listen to make it acceptable.
MP3 was revolutionary when introduced in the early/mid 90ies, but issues with licensing, high complexity and low performance made it obsolete by the early 2000s when OggVorbis came around.
And then Apple (and others) came with HDD based mobile music players (iPod etc.) and as the price for storage went down, so did lossy formats for music become obsolete and the world of music consumers switched to FLAC and ALAC. Perfectly ripping a bought CD became as easy as putting it into the drive and pushing the button in itunes (or whatever software you used).
That was the next format war, but in the early 2010s, apple made alac free to use. the transition from hdd based players to smartphones for music playback meant that both in the stationary and in the mobile world, every device can now play all the formats and has enough space available since about a decade.
So yeah, lossles is not a 'gimmick', it's simply the standard. Has been for many years. And much easier to use.
BT Headphones and earpieces will eventually follow. Lossy compression went from 'abysmal' to 'acceptable' in over 15 years of BT development. If they could just jack up their real world data rate to maybe 250kb/s (allow some headspace), they would have solved their problems.
Data source?
CD bitrates can run over 1500 kbps. Even highly compressed streaming services run at 256 kbps or higher.
I think you're misunderstanding the comments. Nobody is arguing against lossless quality. Merely pointing out that in 'consumer' level devices such as the Airpods range, there would be no real perceivable benefit from including it. Adding such a feature to audio equipment at this level, is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. The actual technology involved in such products is relatively low end; you can buy wired earphones that sound as good as APPs for under £100; you're paying the extra for the wireless abilities. As myself and others have mentioned, to be truly able to discern any real difference in sound quality, you'd really need to be using equipment that is quite significantly higher end than any of the current wireless ear/headphones. And you'd also need to be listening in a quiet environment; adding ANC colours the sound effectively rendering it just outside of 'hifi' territory.
Audio equipment is all about diminishing returns. A £1000 hifi system of amplifier and speakers (to which you can add whatever source) will sound significantly better than a £100 system. But a £10,000 system will not yield the same degree of 'improvement' to the sound quality, as that law of diminishing returns kicks in. Indeed, quite a lot of expensive hifi stuff is Emperor's New Clothes really. Yes; you can make quite significant improvements by spending not so much money; I went from some B+W DM601 speakers, to some Focal Arias, and the difference was very noticeable; better clarity, greater dynamic range, better delivery of sounds at different frequencies, better controlled low frequencies or 'bass'. So that's perhaps a jump from say £300-400, to £900. Are the Focals 2-3x as good? Hmm. That's not really quantifiable in such terms. Am I happy I spent the extra? Most definitely. In recent years, I've effectively replaced a ca.£1000 system with one that would cost around £2500-3000 new. Yes, that has brought benefits in terms of overal sound quality. Benefits I can happily justify spending money on. Would I spend more? Perhaps not, as the limitations of both my ears and the acoustics of my home would see that LoDR kick in to the point where it would probably be a waste of money, imo. Everyone has their own limits as to what they want to spend, and on what.
So. In short, it's not really worth worrying to much about lossless on current wireless ear/headphones, as they are technologically limited anyway, in terms of their fidelity. Nobody is arguing against it; it's just like it's not really worth sticking a Ferrari engine in a Toyota Yaris or whatever.
No, lossy audio codecs are just very good and transparent nowadays, it is almost question of taste if it AAC or Opus for example.
Not the fast food option but a very good good enough option. I would argue that most people can't tell apart a AAC with 256 kbps and a FLAC audio file. So for most purposes it is completely fine. But if you are archiving your music, FLAC or another lossless audio format might be the better option.
I think of something like this
The bitrate of a CD is fixed, at 1,411,200 bit per second, many streaming services have quality settings, YouTube Music uses for low quality AAC/Opus at 48 kbps, at normal quality 128 kpbs and at high quality setting 256 kbps.
And AAC and Opus can be already transparent at 128, meaning indistinguishable to the CD with slightly over 1400 kbps.
Lossless audio codecs have their purpose. And until Bluetooth 2 the transmission rate was just 2 Mbps, and how much you are achieved of that in the actual world, I don't know. Later revision got more but again, real world experience might vary. So why bother to put an almost 1 Mbps audio stream through it, when you can get the same result with just AAC 256 kbps?
An Audio CD has 44100Hz sampling rate, 2 channels, 16bit. That's 1411200 bits per second net data rate (without error correction, overhead etc.).
So 172kb/s (rounded to the next full kilobyte). And it's in the vicinity of 150kb/s.
My statement stands. And yes, you can make a data CD and encode higher resolution audio on it.
And then there was this odd Super Audio CD. And CD+G which crammed in a few extra bytes for graphics.
Since lossless is standard, where is the benefit in not including it?
Why should BT development be stopped to not make the audio experience on par with other solutions?
Apple tries to sell their airpods above what competitors ask for. Providing better technology is a good way to seal the deal. Those people that are afraid of having lossless wireless technology in their earbuds have a great selection of competitors at a cheaper pricepoint.
Isn’t battery life a concern? Maybe today lossless over Bluetooth is not a reality, but sure keep up the r&d and see if it’s feasible. Including a codec where the hardware can’t support it, seems like a waste, which is maybe why this isn’t now a standard.
According to earnings calls, they have already sealed the deal.
Sure, speaking wireless, if you want an over the head headphone such as the xm4/5. What about an in the ear wireless?
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I cared. And I know many people cared. So the assumption that no ppl cared is absolutely incorrect
I also lament Apple’s lack of FLAC support but for a slightly different reason.
When I am travelling, possibly in areas where I have inadequate or non-existent network coverage (e.g. hiking or on an airplane) I like to have all of my purchased music library on my iPhone. My master library is all stored on my PC as FLAC and for the copies I put on my phone I need to create a shadow folder structure with AAC versions of my FLAC files. I need to manually keep my AAC files in sync with my main FLAC directory structure every time I purchase new music. In theory iTunes could do that for me automatically because it can compress lossless files to AAC on the fly as it syncs them to an iPhone but since iTunes simply won’t see my FLAC master files at all I can’t use that feature unless I was willing to convert all of my master copies from FLAC to ALAC which I’m not.
Admittedly not the end of the world, dbPowerAmp is a nice tool to use when I need to do manual conversions to keep my AAC repository up to date, but annoying none the less.
Flac is a golden standard for lossless music, but i don’t see why ALAC should be a joke. Yes, it isn’t supported as widely. But lossless is lossless, there aren’t any technical disadvantagrs compared to Flac and at least as far as id tags are concerned, alac offers more (p.e. “Explicit” label)