Macrumors could have just reported on the news and left it to the readers to form their own opinions. I know if you say anything positive on the internet, you’re a corporate shill and bootlicker, but this article is nothing but a desperate attempt for clicks (which is working).
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Don't Buy Into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Lossless Audio
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I don't think anyone is doubting lossless can be distinguished from lossy, they are doubting it can be distinguished on the Airpods Max.
You won't be able to tell the difference between a high quality raw image and a compressed jpeg on most consumer screens, either.
Double blind tests have shown over and over and over and over and over again that nobody can tell the difference between 44.1/16 160 Kbps or higher MP3/AAC files and uncompressed, or lossless audio. Anyone who claims that they can are lying or trying to justify the money and time they've wasted. Similarly, anything uncompressed over 44.1/16 is a waste of time and space, there is not distinguishable difference to humans (highrez is usefull in audio production because it reduces artifacting between generations and has more dynamic range before clipping, that's IT). Also, vinyl is vastly inferior to digital, always has been, always will be. It has less dynamic range, less fidelity, way more noise, way less channel separation, and a terrible pickup system. So called audiophiles are lying to the world and themselves.
So basically nothing stated here has any basis in reality. They must have forgotten the /s
Honestly that would have been a too little too late move. The H3 chip is expected later this year. They only released the USB-C version for compliance with European markets. The Next AirPods Max having an H3 chip would make them stand out compared to the current/original version. It would make the marketing more dramatic/impressive.
Why does this article sound a little defensive/aggressive? It's weird for the normally very-pro and defensive of Apple MacRumors to be so critical of a new feature that hasn't even been released yet.
After years of people complaining that APM didn't support lossless, it's amazing how quickly one cynically worded headline can get the cattle stampeding in a different direction.
Because Apple enthusiasts have this self-perceived superiority complex, everything is premium, high quality and best-in-class… except when it isn’t. They can’t look at Apple’s products and services objectively, praise them for what they do well and criticize them for what they don’t. No. Everything has to be the best there ever was, even when the mouse has a charging port on the bottom.
They spent $500 on what was sold to them as the supposed ultimate aural experience, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. Now when Apple comes out and admits there’s something better, and what they had all along wasn't actually perfect, they get butthurt that what they spent months/years calling the “best” actually was not the best, and their pride gets the best of them.
Now all of a sudden lossless audio is “not that important!” and “You can’t tell the difference anyway!” Despite lossless audio being a basic digital standard for over 40 years that Apple’s products were incapable of providing, and the facts show that the AirPods have only ever provided a watered-down audio experience all along.
Apple is so high tech and forward thinking, but their 2025 flagship audio product up until this point performed measurably and audibly worse than a 1980’s discman.
They finally reached equivalence and maybe even surpassed what 1980’s tech was capable of, but they only achieved that by going back to the wires that quality conscious people lambasted them for abandoning a decade ago.
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Just like those “studies“ who claimed people cannot tell the difference above 24fps/30fps to push movies that were capped at 24fps/30fps, while professional gamers are now using 240hz monitors in 2025.
This “elitism“ that I know better than you, so what you say must be wrong is just laughable.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big supporter of lossless audio just from a preservation standpoint. And maybe, if you have a really expensive stereo system, it might sound slightly better. But buying that $40 cable is a waste of money. But hey, if people think it sounds better, go for it.
There are no studies that said people cannot tell the difference above 24 fps. 24 fps was the "minimum" requirement for pictures to look like a motion. That's why it was chosen.
Blind A/B test results for lossless vs lossy audio are always the same. You cannot tell which is which.
Even using the best stereo system, a blind A/B test between lossy and lossless is always the same result. Nobody can tell which is which. If you really trust your ears, choose your stereo setup. Download any A/B test app, Apple used to have one. Feed it any track you want. And see the results for yourself.
Yes but at least I can hear the difference between a 1000$ headphone and a 100$ one. I still might prefer the 100$ one because this is all subjective. But lossy vs lossless, nobody can tell which is which.
It has been widely established in the past. that nobody could see beyond 24fps, then it become 30 fps and then it became 60fps. This all has been proven false.
And your “study” is a bunch of crap, because I hear it no problem.
So I guess all those producers who use huge sample libraries are doing it wrong? We could have been using MP3’s all this time according to MacRumors and some random “study”.
As a professional producer and mixing engineer, I’d like to add that this MacRumors article was written by a moron.
Just report the news/rumours, we’re not here for your views on if lossless audio is ‘worth it’.
Just report the news/rumours, we’re not here for your views on if lossless audio is ‘worth it’.
Right the best wireless systems right now for musicians are around 2.4ms which is low enough. I think Apple’s engineers can achieve this with some proprietary work.
As you said standing a few feet from the speaker will introduce latency, personally when playing guitar I need my entire signal chain to always be less than 12ms, ideally under 8ms.
I can notice the difference between 1-2ms and 4-5ms when using headphones, it’s kind of surreal because you never hear sound represented that way and it feels like it arrives before you’re done striking the note. A rare few standalone guitar amp sims run through a high quality 192khz interface can get latency around 1.6ms. Mixwave Benson can do this and I recommend any guitarist with the equipment try it out sometime because it’s wild.
I don’t suggest getting used to it becuase everything will probably start to feel slow if you start playing that way a lot, but it’s nice for tracking very fast parts.
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The lossless sucks arguments are hilarious, nobody should comment on them unless they have been to an audiologist or they’re in their early teens. Most people do not protect their hearing and have a substantial amount of loss, and even then it’s dependent on the entire audio chain to reproduce faithfully, and dependent on the source material.
I did blind abx test high-res audio and can hear it but it took a hell of an audio system and I was using Studio Monitors that cost more than most Macs. It’s marginal at best.
The difference between lossy and lossless though is very noticeable and likely even so on the AirPods Max which punch above their weight in the closed-back class of headphones, particularly once you measure your ears and apply the HRTF. If you can’t hear it, enjoy the lower file size and bandwidth savings. It’s mostly a big deal for the artists and producers and engineers that need to do this critical work for a living, and then sadly have that work translate to an iPhone speaker in many cases.
This is why using Apple’s renderer to check mixes is a big deal, you want to test exactly what you’re getting out. I’ve had discussions with real grammy-winning pros about this back when Spatial Audio launched and Apple at the time was really screwing things up with their renderer by applying a second pass that was wildly different than Dolby. Thankfully they moved quickly and corrected it but I had to point them in the direction.
That first batch of Spatial Audio mixes that were done mostly through slapdash automation was …yikes. But now it’s really good for the most part with head tracking disabled, and you get a ton more headroom with Atmos / Spatial mixes vs. Stereo which also probably makes the lossless vs. lossy thing even more important since there’s more information physically present and compression algorithms would reduce the nice headroom that the Dolby spec provides.
Don’t even get me started on Binaural… there’s a real complaint you can make about Apple since you can only upload 2 masters to iTunes connect instead of 3 which should be the standard (Stereo, Binaural, Atmos). Instead we have to settle for folddowns which is a ****** way to force Apple users into Spatial Audio when Binaural may be more engaging depending on the content. Nothing’s perfect.
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Greg Joswiak's over emphatic and slightly disingenuous promotion of Apple products and services is in my opinion systematic of the current failings of Apple over Apple Intelligence.
But this is a technical improvement that can be measured and for those who care and have the ear for it, then it is certainly possible to tell the difference between compressed AAC, and lossless 16bit and then 24bit given the right gear. The kHz value less so. Greg calling 16bit 44.1kHz is clearly not the ultimate though; I'm tempted to just not listen to him about anything anymore
Currently the only way to get lossless out of Apple Music is using built in speakers on Apple devices, or via USB from the Apple device through a DAC to your speakers, because AirPlay 2 downsamples to AAC a lot of the time, and bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth. It would be nice if you could get a streamer (such as a WiiM Pro Plus for example) to have Apple Music built in, the way they do with lots of other services (Tidal, Qobuz etc) so you didn't need an Apple device, and you can connect the streamer dierctly to an amp or Active speakers, but Apple don't license that to manufactures so that's not an option.
Before this annoucement, if you want lossless to your headphones on iPhone then you will need to plug in a DAC (such as the iFi GO Link) and headphones into that, which is clunky and awkward while on the move.
So this gives us an option to play Apple Music lossless (and presumably Qobuz, Tidal etc unless Apple are doing something tricky to stop it!) much more easily from iPhone to Airpod Max headphones. I am keen to hear how Apple Lossless compares to Qobuz which I find is generally better mastered than Tidal for example.
And you can also now plug AirPods Max into an Amp's headphone socket using the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm audio cable (and probably a ¼″ to 3.5mm adapter) and get lossless from that source to your headphones.
But this is a technical improvement that can be measured and for those who care and have the ear for it, then it is certainly possible to tell the difference between compressed AAC, and lossless 16bit and then 24bit given the right gear. The kHz value less so. Greg calling 16bit 44.1kHz is clearly not the ultimate though; I'm tempted to just not listen to him about anything anymore
Currently the only way to get lossless out of Apple Music is using built in speakers on Apple devices, or via USB from the Apple device through a DAC to your speakers, because AirPlay 2 downsamples to AAC a lot of the time, and bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth. It would be nice if you could get a streamer (such as a WiiM Pro Plus for example) to have Apple Music built in, the way they do with lots of other services (Tidal, Qobuz etc) so you didn't need an Apple device, and you can connect the streamer dierctly to an amp or Active speakers, but Apple don't license that to manufactures so that's not an option.
Before this annoucement, if you want lossless to your headphones on iPhone then you will need to plug in a DAC (such as the iFi GO Link) and headphones into that, which is clunky and awkward while on the move.
So this gives us an option to play Apple Music lossless (and presumably Qobuz, Tidal etc unless Apple are doing something tricky to stop it!) much more easily from iPhone to Airpod Max headphones. I am keen to hear how Apple Lossless compares to Qobuz which I find is generally better mastered than Tidal for example.
And you can also now plug AirPods Max into an Amp's headphone socket using the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm audio cable (and probably a ¼″ to 3.5mm adapter) and get lossless from that source to your headphones.
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Wow. This has to be the worst article ever posted on this site. Shame on whatever editor allowed this to get published. An author who doesn't understand lossless audio at all, has the nerve to tell people that you don't need lossless audio.
Apple today announced that AirPods Max with a USB-C port will be gaining support for lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio with a firmware update next month, alongside the release of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS 15.4.
For context, audio files are typically compressed to keep file sizes smaller. There are lossy compression standards like MP3, and Apple's own Advanced Audio Codec (AAC), which result in some data loss. Then, there are lossless compression standards like Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), which preserve all of the original data. The entire Apple Music catalog of more than 100 million songs is encoded in both AAC and ALAC.
In a post on X today, Apple's marketing chief Greg Joswiak said lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio are the "ultimate" audio upgrades for the AirPods Max, promising "mind-blowing sound quality." However, this marketing claim appears to be at odds with what Apple states in a support document on its website.
In the document, Apple says AAC already delivers audio that is "virtually indistinguishable" from an original studio recording. Accordingly, the company also says "the difference between AAC and lossless audio is virtually indistinguishable."
If lossless audio offers no major improvement over AAC, according to Apple, then calling it an "ultimate" upgrade is unjustified marketing hype.
As for lower latency, that does not directly impact sound quality.
All in all, lossless audio is far less significant of an upgrade than Joswiak is making it out to be, as Apple admits on its very own website.
Article Link: Don't Buy Into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Lossless Audio
How about you leave that up to the audiophiles to decide, and stay in your lane. If you even have one.
Isn't this just for lossless with AirPods Max? I don't see anything that changes how you get lossless for you music system at home - that still requires a Mac/iPhone/Ipad connected to a DAC via USB-C, unless I'm missing something?
Yeah, ok. You happen to have any double-blind, randomized experiments that show that people can detect a difference with lossless? I’ll answer that for you; No, you don’t. It’s all in your head.
I can't count the number of times Apple has used deceptive marketing declarations since its foundation.