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New AirPods Pro Do Not Support Lossless Apple Music
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1) Let's not group all lossy into the same bin. I, for one, can usually tell the difference between 128kbps and lossless. When it gets to 256 or 320, I start to lose the ability to distinguish at all.
2) People clamoring for lossless are within their right to do so, but with many technologies Apple has a proven philosophy of not getting into the realm of diminishing returns. Their screen pixel density has remained relatively constant since the iPhone 4. People screamed for increased ppi to compete with Samsung for years, but that noise has died down as people came around to the fact that it literally almost never is noticeable to go higher than about 330 for LCD and 450 for OLED (due to pixel structure).
2) People clamoring for lossless are within their right to do so, but with many technologies Apple has a proven philosophy of not getting into the realm of diminishing returns. Their screen pixel density has remained relatively constant since the iPhone 4. People screamed for increased ppi to compete with Samsung for years, but that noise has died down as people came around to the fact that it literally almost never is noticeable to go higher than about 330 for LCD and 450 for OLED (due to pixel structure).
do you care to explain which non-oversampling DAC you are regularly using? Or are you actually upsampling all your 16/44.1 audio to higher resolutions? That would seem more than a bit hypocritical
Sorry to break it to you, the APM AUX cable has a DAC/ADAC built in that is quite literally not capable of playing lossless audio (only 24/48).
If you want to actually experience true lossless you'll need a DAC and different headphones/speakers.
No, I'm not upsampling. I'm just stating a basic indisputable fact that unless you're a bat you're not going hear any benefit from hi-res audio. Any objective benefit will always only be because the masters are just better, Which I know is definitely sometimes very true. But it has nothing to do with the bit depth/sample rate because 16/44 is good enough.
Though Apple for some reason claims the APM are not capable of lossless audio using a wired capable, it is somewhat incorrect and misleading. If you take lossless audio to mean absolute bit-perfect reproduction of the original signal, then no, it is not capable of playing lossless audio. And that is because it goes through multiple digital to analog conversion stages.
If you take lossless to mean not encoded using lossy compression; then they ARE capable of playing lossless audio. Nothing is lossy compressed when using the APM via the 3.5mm cable.
All that said - they still suck though
So again, if you’re not regularly upsampling your audio to higher resolutions, which non-oversampling DAC are you using?
There are only so many on the market in this day and age. And you feel so strongly about this, that hi-res makes no sense for listening whatsoever. So surely YOU of all people wouldn’t be upsampling all of your standard-res material to such “useless” hi-res sampling rates, and surely you would go out of your way to use a DAC not designed around a delta-sigma chip. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here. So, I’ll ask again, which non-oversampling DAC are you using?
I don't have a dog in this fight.
First guy said nobody has ever been able to tell the difference in a blind A/B test.
That's a BOLD claim.
A claim that would be easy and obvious to refute with a link.
Got one?
Missed in regards to the airpods, which is what this thread is about.
Only reason I’ll be upgrading the phone is because of the SOS feature. I spend a lot of time deep in the woods on my dirt bike and snowboarding. If it wasn’t for that I would have stood pat on everything. I’ve been in the market for a Spot, but never pulled the trigger, and I don’t have to now.
Apple increased the talk time, improved the noise reduction, gave it a better driver, and gave us a way to adjust volume. That seems like a pretty good update. There isn’t much else I’d want in new AirPods .
Lossless might not be here now, but that was never going to be very useful on such small speakers.
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There is a reason I linked the Xiph.org article above and it's because it gives an explanation of all aspects that make high-resolution audio basically irrelevant for the end consumer. It also mentions oversampling in the context of digital audio techniques of course.
100% correct. There’s reasons these “lossless players” and FLAC players failed. Overpriced and couldn’t tell the difference.
I don't get your logic at all. Oversampling on playback has supposed benefits which I won't dispute, even though I doubt I can hear them, and which you obviously are aware of or else you wouldn't be talking about oversampling. But it has nothing at all to do with the actual sample rate or bit depth of the source file, for which 16/44 has been proved sufficient by science, about a century ago.
On top of that it's definitely an apples vs. oranges comparison.
- CD-DA "16/44" is PCM format: 16 bit at 44.1 kHz where the signal's amplitude is represented as a sequence of 16 bit values.
- Delta-Sigma is PDM format. SACD as example: 1 bit at 2.8 mHz, where the signal's amplitude is represented by the density of bits in a given interval.
SACD having a sampling rate of 2.8 mHz does not mean it can accurately represent sound frequencies of 1.4 mHz, since it relies on 1-bit sampling averages within an interval of time to accurately represent the amplitude at that time.
SACD's 2.8 mHz sampling rate as example "only" allows for an actual frequency response of 100kHz: a lot less compared to the 1.4 mHz frequency response that a PCM format would achieve at the same sampling rate.
It took me 4-8 years to save up enough money and buy and sell audio components, to build and match components in my $135K headphone system plus $26K in headphones. I built my own $80K balanced, dual chassis headphone amp and power supply based on the AMB Labs Beta22/Sigma22 amp and power supply PCBs which have the world’s cleanest design, plus many upgrades of my own, which took 3 years to design (even the gorgeous dual chassis which cost $8K to CNC machine a one-off), refine, machine, and build. It is a one-off build for my own audio business as a benchmark amplifier with a perfectly flat frequency from DC-200,000Hz (way beyond human hearing), and an almost perfectly flat frequency range from 200kHz-2MHz. It also has the lowest output impedance of any headphone amplifier ever built at 0.01 ohms.
Maybe your ears lack the ability, but I’ve tested mine and can hear variances between channels as low as 0.3dB with scars on my right eardrum (and the 0.5 nanometer thin drivers are matched to within 0.5dB of each other in my Audeze LCD-4 planar magnetic $4K headphones). I can most certainly hear the difference between 320kbps MP3 files or AAC files vs. Lossless audio 16/44.1 ALAC. Since my 40lb. discrete balanced DAC uses eight Sign-Magnitude chips (basically R-2R ladders in a chip/IC which were developed in 2000 and recently discontinued in place of cheaper, crappy Delta-Sigma chips that support new formats), the digital filters only yield a 3% difference between bit-perfect 16/44.1 and bit-perfect 24/96 (the max resolution at 8x oversampling) due to the fact the quality of my DAC is so good. Newer Delta-Sigma DACs sound poor at 16/44.1 CD quality which is why they require super high resolutions of 24/192, or formats like DSD or DXD to sound better. I’ve done head to head tests between my system and hundreds of other newer and more expensive ones, and the comparison isn’t even close. (In fact at one headphone meet, someone wanted to buy my system and I looked him up online after he gave me his business card and his personal net worth was in the tens of $ billions, so he could afford anything he wanted, and this was prior to me getting much better headphones.)
Anyway, that’s my reply. On 9/7 I pre pre-ordered my new iPhone 📱 to get ready to just checkout today when the Apple Store (app) went live at 8:04 am EST (5:04 am PDT). Today I pre-ordered (as part of the Apple Upgrade Program) my iPhone 14 Pro Max 1TB (Space Black) to arrive on 9/16. I also decided to bite the bullet and pre-ordered the AirPods Pro 2nd Gen which I only use for Spatial Audio with my AppleTV 4K 2nd Gen. (I never would have bought the first AirPods Pro at $249 but when I saw them on an Amazon flash sale for $139 I decided to try them out, and they work well for watching movies.) For high-res, portable, stereo listening I use my Audeze LCDi4 planar magnetic in-ears ($2.5K) with a good balanced DAC/THX AAA-78 balanced Amp.
But I do have hope that Apple will be able to do a firmware update to the AirPods Pro 2nd Gen (with new H2 chip) that enables lossless audio. Maybe that’s why they are shipping out a week later than the iPhones. Only time will tell.
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Most people cannot discern 320kbps MP3 vs original, no matter how good their equipment is.
Maybe you can, but unless you actually test it you don't really know. Conduct an ABX test yourself with your own equipment and your own audio samples: the results might surprise you.
I wonder does the iPhone 14 models support Bluetooth 5.3, including Bluetooth LE with the LC3 codec.
I'm not reading all of that - but the test is there for you to show us these magic ears you think you have - http://abx.digitalfeed.net
All that nonsense you wrote and the equipment you bought and you had to end with that paragraph showing you really haven't got a clue how technology works. Sigh.
Indeed - and you can't hear the difference between either of them!
The only need for ultra high res is during the recording stage. It enables us to process plugins at higher sample rates which without writing a scientific essay stops certain mathematical errors in the audio - however you can still do everything at 44.1khz and upsample in the plugin itself to do this. When it comes to listening back 44.1khz is already much higher than the human ear can hear and bit rate doesn't have any influence on sound quality just dynamic range.
In **theory** you could have a ridiculous low noise floor on a classical record at 24 bit with insane dynamic range, but in reality it wouldn't make much difference. 24bit is great for recording at as you don't need to worry about the levels (and indeed some mixers employing floating point 32bit and even 64bit which basically means it's impossible to over load and distort or have a signal to quiet) back in the analog days you were restricted to a lot less dynamic range on tape than even 16bit could offer you (and a hugely increased noise floor which used most of it up)
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It's maddening isn't it - coming from the world that actually makes and mixes music to people who only consume it and are completely dumbed founded by snake oil and things they don't understand. The Audiophiles will forever be the suckers of the tech world that companies continually exploit. I've seen them come out with some absolute insane stuff and the irony is they think they're clued on it and really knowledgeable!
Oh dear lord - you need help. The 1's and 0's ARE EXACTLY THE SAME IN BOTH FILES.
This place is unbelievable.
It depends on the mastering of the source. Lossless is pointless for a highly compressed music. A needle drop from a quality vinyl will sound great even with the Bluetooth earbuds.
Even on high end gear the difference between high quality lossy (AAC >256) and lossless (even hi-res) is pretty much non-existent to 99,9% of the human population. Placebo and magical thinking are a common thing in the audiophile community. Lossless and hi-res lossless are great for archiving and editing in the studio. For consumers it's basically a big nothingburger. To all those golden eared wizards on this site I'd like to say: I'm not buying what you're selling without actual solid ABX test results.
But it's the terroir of the files that really make the real difference
I did a physiological psychoacoustic test with special microphones that rest inside the ear cups, starting with my computer and exiting through my headphone amp, where I first input my estimation of the amount of channel imbalance between drivers in decibels (every 3dB is an actual doubling of the previous volume, but what actually sounds to the ear like a doubling of the volume is a 6dB increase) so by knowing that I am able to input my estimation. I inputted a -0.3dB difference in the right driver (most people can’t tell the difference of a +/-3dB difference), and the actual difference by measurement more sensitive than an eardrum and inner ear was a -0.36dB difference.
As far as frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz, a compressed MP3 @ 320kbps vs. a lossless audio file is used, and you are given a 20-band EQ to correct what you perceive to be missing in the compressed MP3 audio file after first hearing a 15 second clip of the MP3 and then the same 15 second clip of the lossless file which is played three times in a row (and also a 30 second clip both played three times in a row and a 60 second clip both played three times in a row). On the 15 second clip I scored a 98.3% accuracy of 20-Band EQ correction for what I found lacking in the MP3; on the 30 second clip I scored a 96.8% accuracy; on the 60 second clip I scored a 95.4% accuracy. (Audio memory is typically extremely fleeting where most people can’t hear a difference after a short or long amount of time because lossless audio has a range of 19,980 different frequencies sampled 44,100 times per second.) That is the reason the accuracy is highest on the shortest clip. The average scores on this particular software and hardware (designed by professional audiologists working with “audiophiles”, that I was able to get my hands on through a fellow audio company, and because you need a USB key to run it and my version was hacked, I can’t say much about it) has an average accuracy scoring in the negative range of -12.8% to an average positive range of 7.2%. It is mainly purchased by audiophiles, though many audiologists use it as well and they don’t come close to using the type of high-end equipment I’m using. But I’ve been listening to high-end equipment since 1993 and trained my brain’s tone maps over the course of a two year period to adjust to flat, neutral sound.
That’s why I can hear so well and pick up on the most subtle details whereas when I was a teenager I preferred higher treble, recessed mids (the opposite of natural) and medium-high midbass and bass. The brain evolved in our early “caveman” era to be most sensitive to frequencies in nature and the environment, especially vocals which are closest to 1,000Hz, and perceive them as the loudest. Even though the human ear can hear between 20 and 20kHz (19.2kHz-20kHz only lasts until you’re 19 years old, and frequencies below that become harder to hear as you age), it is most sensitive to everything between 250 and 5,000Hz. During a conversation, the fundamental (or lowest, having bass) frequency of an adult man ranges from 80 to 180Hz and an adult woman ranges from 165 to 255Hz.
Hopefully I answered your question to your satisfaction. 😃