There are a ton of amazing headphone options which are less expensive than the AirPods Max that can take advantage of this.
I'm a Hifiman guy myself. Sundara are amazing and are only like $250 and aren't that high impedance.
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New iMac Supports High-Impedance Headphones
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I'm a Hifiman guy myself. Sundara are amazing and are only like $250 and aren't that high impedance.
Nothing changes. AirPods Max do not have an analog input - unfortunately.
No matter how good your external DAC is, the analog signal still must get converted to digital via the ADC inside the cable's Lightning connector.
Then inside the AirPods Max, the data is processed and subsequently converted back to analog via the internal DAC.
Sadly the internal DAC cannot be accessed directly by connecting the AirPods Max via USB.
Those preschoolers are going to a damn fine preschool if they're using iMacs at 4 years old.
They’re a different purpose. You wouldn’t want to wear Hifiman Aryas on a plane.
They’re $100 too expensive but they still have a place
24 bits is good for mastering that’s it. The fact that audio is saved as 24 bits just adds a tiny bit of precision but for mastering it prevents errors when changing the sound.
I cannot tell the difference between 16 bit and 24 bit recordings from a high quality master. Most DACs can only get 14-15 bits of real data from a source file. The best DACs can get 22.
Sampling rate, on the other hand makes a big difference. Though human hearing tops out at 20 kHz for a majority of the young population, Shannon-Nyquist theorem says you need double the frequency rate to accurately sample a signal. However, our senses can perceive the effects of ultrasound up to 50 kHz. So in that case it would seem 96 kHz ought to be enough.
But, PCM encoding is a mathematical model of sound waves. And models are imperfect descriptions of the real world. While your standard Redbook Audio format of 44.1 KHz at 16 bits is a good enough format to archive your sound, you will have to depend on your DAC to have filtering and upsampling to reconstruct the sound wave perfectly. The folks who master a recording use high end DACs and recorders to capture that sound. But consumer level DACs won’t use high quality parts to reconstruct the original wave form. So either people get high end audio circuits or you throw more data so that the math of reconstructing the analog wave form is far more accurate. And that’s why 192 kHz is a useful format. You can use a cheap DAC and get a more accurate analog signal. It’s like going from CRT to LCD.
In practical terms, when using a nice DAC and midrange headphones, a high resolution lossless file will give you more spacing around the instruments, more clarity of the instruments, and also dynamic range. It does that by default without relying on the skill of the person who mastered the sound track. This is very easy to tell when using good equipment.
On 2 channel speakers, high resolution files at 192 kHz can do things like place objects in a very solid location, like vocals in the very center and not smeared over the left and right channels. If you were to use 96 kHz and below you lose a lot of temporal information, even if the sound is apparently the same. That centered vocal now appears to be a wide blob that seems to be in the center but you can hear it left and right too.
So that’s why high resolution files exist. Because it really does sound better.
Fortunately, the red book standard is also great. Mono HomePod sounds a lot clearer and defined when lossless became a thing. Before lossless many of my rock songs can sound a bit sludgy with AAC but lossless made a good speaker into a great speaker.
Since I don't know what those are I'm assuming I can't afford them and that alone may explain why I don't understand the AirPods Max.
I still don't understand why my $300 Bose headphones with an aux jack, which are like ten years old now, are in any way inferior. I use them on airplanes, at home, wherever and they are always amazing and if I want full quality I just plug in a cable and I can hear the improvement. If I want ultimate portability at almost as good sound quality plus all the Apple niceties, I use my less than $200 constantly on sale AirPods Pro 2. I don't see where the Max fits into the equation at all.
I guess all I'm really saying is it seems extremely stubborn of Apple to not just put a line in jack on these incredibly (to me, literally) expensive headphones.
Perhaps Apple’s done their research and know that adding a line in jack to these would only satisfy a segment of the market that wouldn’t buy them anyway because they’re too expensive for them? Why go running after a dollar they’re never going to get?
You really want the price to go up to (a minimum) of $1499 for the base model iMac?
I hope people here realize that, if Apple can put a 35 mm headphone jack along the side of the CPU like that, Apple could also modify the 24-inch iMac design to include a few other ports as well:
SDXC card slot
MicroSDXC card slot
USB-C port
USB-A port
Rest assured, all of these connectivity technologies are still very much in use in 2023 and will remain in use in 2024.
SDXC card slot
MicroSDXC card slot
USB-C port
USB-A port
Rest assured, all of these connectivity technologies are still very much in use in 2023 and will remain in use in 2024.
Yes. With good headphones you usually can, although it’s really hard to tell the difference from some quality lossy formats such as 320kbps .mp3
I like how much credit you’re giving them about this. I thought audio professionals would appreciate a copper line straight in rather than having to always deal with the vagaries of wireless. But I haven’t done any market research and I don’t have the sales numbers, and Apple is definitely not going to tell us.
If you can use them on a plane, they're inferior to open backs from a sound staging and Audio quality standpoint.
Both have their place. For the price, your Bose are definitely better than AirPods Max.
This title keeps tricking me even though I read it already. I keep seeing "New iMac Supports High..." and hoping it says refresh.
For anyone building out a new setup though it may make a difference, Apple is probably hoping they may be willing to upspec the machine because they can spend the money they would have spent on an external DAC
You're probably right. Just seems like if you're going to do 24-bit, 96KHz DAC, why not go all the way to 192? That or make the baseline cheaper and just do 16-bit, 44.1KHz or whatever. Plus, why doesn't offer a full 24-bit, 192 KHz external DAC, and get even more money? But hey, my mind just works weird. Even I don't understand how I think sometimes…