The lossless audio isn't the real benefit of this, it's the low latency. Current latency is ~100ms over bluetooth and is considered unacceptable for live playback of things (DJ'ing, music, etc). People used this on the Lightning version of the Airpods Max apparently, and it was missing until now on the USB-C version.

> The lossless audio isn't the real benefit of this, it's the low latency

And we could have had that on all AirPods, for several years now, if Apple were to finally implement LC3 and Bluetooth LE Audio.

Other than enabling much lower latency for unicast, LE Audio even supports broadcast use cases (think gym TV audio, public announcements, hearing aid audio in cinemas etc) and much more.

I really don't understand why that's taking so long; this type of thing seems exactly like something Apple would usually excel at. (Maybe it's too open a standard, and they can't figure out a way to make gyms and cinemas pay for broadcasting to AirPods?)

Low latency audio for AirPods is already enabled when Game Mode is active: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ios-18s-new-game-mode-m...

> And we could have had that on all AirPods, for several years now, if Apple were to finally implement LC3 and Bluetooth LE Audio.

LC3 still has 50ms or so latency from what I’ve seen. LC3+ is lower, but 20ms is still something. Wired you can be single digit ms easily.

Yes! I have a pair of "on-ear speakers" and they support the broadcast API: https://nwm.global/products/one

but I have not found a single place in the US that uses it

Interesting looking headphones - I'd be interested to read your review of them

LE Audio is still too slow and low quality. The next step will likely be UWB audio.

Leaves me wondering how much "ultra-low" is in milliseconds. Is it essentially a USB audio device?

It's hard to imagine a wireless technology that can improve on the experience of debugging a wire. You can always adjust the length of the wire or splice in a new one.

I don't understand why the industry forced a move to wireless before the technology was up to it. The only company that's figured this out is Apple and they refuse to give up this market advantage. Until device management improves i'll stick with wired.

Wired is absolutely superior but the fact is most people don’t care. There is an entire generation of people that grew up ripping audio from YouTube and could not care less about lossless or latency issues with wired headphones.

The industry realized this and honestly for most people a water resistant phone is worth losing the 1/8” jack and they win with fewer components and thinner phones

The Apple dongle actually measures very well. I’m using one right now for my wired headphones. As someone who has spent too much money on headphones and accessories I don’t miss OTG cables and external DAC/Amps and feel the OEM Apple equipment is great for $10

> The industry realized this and honestly for most people a water resistant phone is worth losing the 1/8” jack and they win with fewer components and thinner phones

This would make sense if people didn't turn around and spend more than is saved on wireless headphones. I don't understand what people see in airpods (they work sufficiently but they're bleached and molded plastic; vomit, way too expensive for any possible use-case), but they're enormously successful and more than validated the removal of the jack. By like multiple orders of magnitude.

Anyway, I've definitely had waterproof phones with a headphone jack. I'm guessing they removed it just to save on space. I wish I gave a shit about the shape of the phone, but the primary difference is I view my phone as more of a toy than a tool.

Wired is absolutely inferior if you move at all and the cable hits something or the wind hits the cable etc.

> Accordingly, the company also says "the difference between AAC and lossless audio is virtually indistinguishable."

Then how come they are offering lossless audio on Apple Music, and even (actuall physically!) imperceptible "Hi-Res Lossless"? Are enough dogs and bats paying for it to justify the extra bandwidth required by 24 kbps/96 KHz audio?

When catering to pseudoscience, arguably one really needs to go all the way. Do it like Sony, for example; go full "audiophile" and invent your own Bluetooth audio codec [1]. Or digitally sign your bits to make a special light go on on expensive hardware [2].

Delivering lossless 24/96 to the device and then downsampling it to 16/48 and AAC compressing it for the last meter over Bluetooth is just sad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDAC_(codec)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated

> Then how come they are offering lossless audio on Apple Music, and even (actuall physically!) imperceptible "Hi-Res Lossless"?

Because people, despite repeated double blind testing, claim they can hear a difference. That’s the only reason. Same reason anyone offers an output format beyond 16-bit/48k for audio playback. It’s pointless, but people think it matters for stupid reasons.

Yep. People will pay for it even if there’s only a perceived benefit. Everyone who has hung out with audiophiles has known at least one who is convinced they can hear the difference. But if that person was tested in a blinded format would they actually succeed?

Lossless music is great. As an archival tool, to transcode into something smaller on your actual listening device. It’s not a technology designed for streaming or listening in today’s world.

> But if that person was tested in a blinded format would they actually succeed?

I always think of that famous coathanger post: https://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/speakers-when-...

And the immediate nitpicking following it: "Is your speaker system time coherent?"

Meh. Some people might truly be able to hear the difference. A very small amount. I have some visual perception differences, even participated in a Stanford study on high fidelity visual perception.

Example - on a 2880x1800 15" screen up to 10 feet away, I can see a quarter pixel (subpixel, really) difference in position. Can also tell a 3% difference in HSL values. New colleagues like to "test" me to see if that's actually true by moving something by 0.25px to see if I can actually tell, and I always can.

Being pretty good at visual design/ having freakish perceptual abilities lead me to meet a lot of music producers at the top of their game/ musicians that sell out stadiums, etc. I've tried testing a bunch of them on lossless versus lossy. Something like 2 out of 5 of them can repeatedly tell the difference.

That said, all but three of those people said they can't actually tell the difference unless they're paying really close attention. One of them, one of the top grossing producers of all time, said lossy compression gives him a migraine.

Just saying that dismissing ANYONE having the ability to tell the difference seems inaccurate. Though I'd bet the number of people, globally, who can tell the difference numbers in the thousands

Apple Music will not stream 24/96 to you if you are not using compatible equipment

But it’s nice to have the option because even my wife, who doesn’t care about audio at all, can immediately tell if my home theater is playing a DTS-MA track or an AAC track. We have a pretty modest 5.1 setup from a aperion audio. High quality audio formats are not flim flam in and of itself.

LDAC is actually a great codec and I understand it’s available to every android device, so thank you to Sony for inventing it. It’s indistinguishable to me against a flac file over wired connections. And I actually can tell the difference with lesser codecs.

I cannot tell the difference above CD quality audio, and even still not reliably at lower quality. That doesn’t mean it’s worthless.

Calling it pseudoscience is a little simplistic IMHO.

There are double-blinded studies which shows experts can distinguish between 44khz and 88khz sampling rates. The Pras & Guastavino paper [1] is the most convincing and offers insight on the difference between content types. In particular, for the recording test, the differences only held for orchestral content, not other types of music.

There are earlier studies which shows the general public cannot discriminate e.g. Meyer and Moran [2], which kicked off the entire controversy back in the day. And even the Meyer and Moran paper points out in the conclusion that the introduction of higher bandwidth audio in turn has enabled recording engineers to spend more time on producing quality recordings, and that has increased listening quality for all users, versus recordings made just to maximize loudness.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257068631_Sampling_...

[2] https://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdf

Last I checked, Apple's iTunes store is still stuck on 256k AAC "iTunes Plus", first introduced in 2007. Sounds OK, but doesn't transcode well. I just want regular audio samples as a future proof format that doesn't require physical media.

Cymbals used to be the hallmark of terrible MP3 encoding artifacts, but they seem better on AAC.

> Then how come they are offering lossless audio on Apple Music, and even (actuall physically!) imperceptible "Hi-Res Lossless"?

Overkill makes good marketing. People largely just want to feel like they're getting the best.

First we have Gruber. Then we have Macrumors. Something about the Apple's PR wall is falling.

Was ready to upvote. But a bit strange seeing this comment from the person who posted the article.

At least I never understood submission of an article to automatically signal endorsement (either of the reporting or the news being reported).

Hmm, I thought it was good etiquette for posters to comment, rather than just throw a link out there with little effort.

The submission was precisely because I want to post this comment.

All I want is Spatial Audio with head tracking that doesn't have audio drop outs, an issue that has been there from the start and never fixed. At this point I'll give up the wireless aspect for it.

> There are lossy compression standards like MP3, and Apple's own Advanced Audio Codec (AAC), which result in some data loss.

While Apple popularized usage of AAC, I think it's disingenuous to say that it's "Apple's own" format. Wasn't it developed by MPEG, and therefore, was an industry collaboration? Maybe it's because I've never been an Apple fan, but am I alone in thinking this?

AAC was indeed developed primarily by Fraunhofer IIS, which also developed MP3.

Apple definitely was one of the earliest adopters with their iPod line, though, and arguably helped make it mainstream.

I do appreciate that they picked an industry standard (patent-encumbered, though) instead of coming up with their own secret sauce, though. Not sure they'd still do the same today.

Everything was patent encumbered to some extent, it was just a question of how you read the patents. I worked at AT&T Labs in the early days (they were also some of the inventors) and I remember being invited to Sony Music studios in Japan around 1999/2000, where the head of their studio business let us do a “dance off” between AAC and the proprietary Sony ATRAC3 codec at similar bitrates. Using AAC was a pretty obvious win vs. most of the alternatives out there around the time iTunes launched.

AAC-LC has been patent free for at least 6 years already if not longer. Unfortunately the best AAC-LC encoder is from Apple and it is not open source. But everyone can still freely use it though.

Macrumors has never been good or accurate with technology reporting.

It is an industry standard, in the sense that there are published standards for it and it was developed by an industry consortium, but in practice it never got traction outside Apple and they are essentially the only one who uses it. This happens sometimes: FireWire was an IEEE standard too but Apple and Sony were pretty much the only users. I don’t think it’s too misleading to refer to it as a de facto Apple-only technology.

>in practice it never got traction outside Apple and they are essentially the only one who uses it

Are you thinking of ALAC? What you're saying is true, if you're talking about ALAC. ALAC is Apple's lossless codec. AAC is a lossy codec and is unrelated to ALAC.

AAC is an industry standard. It's in the Nintendo DSi and 3DS handhelds. Heck, according to wikipedia, the Nokia S40 series of phones supports it.

What? AAC is one of the most common codecs used for streaming audio on the internet, Opus being the other common one. It's not exclusive to Apple at all.

You are aware that 99% of the video mp4 containers you ever watched use AAC for the audio stream?

Maybe Apple is one of the few who use AAC for audio-only purposes, but as a technology AACs predominant use is in video (as a percentage of marketshare). And because literally everything can play MP4s, as such they can also play AAC.

For my aging Apple devices, I have historically liked the airpod pros.

But have never understood the hype around the AirPod “max” headphones.

Are professionals really using the AirPod max over much better and higher quality headphones?

As a regular consumer and $549, I would rather pick up some regular open back headphones from sennheiser (hd490s) and save myself some $ and get much higher quality headphones.

Plus these headphones had issues with weight and wearing them for long periods of time.

No amount of updates will fix the issues with these headphones. It’s nothing more than a flex