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Comment by periheli0n | Hacker News Reader

I think the real question is why AirPods Max have received tons of praise for their unmatched audio quality when they were released, and now suddenly are talked down to second tier because they don’t support lossless?

I mean, surely all those audiophile testers were aware that they are listening to compressed music? Or is this a recent realisation?

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The praise that I heard was about the quality of the transparency mode and the integration with Apple's ecosystem. On the reviews that I saw the reviewers were very careful not to claim unmatched audio quality.

To be honest, I don't think that this is a big limitation in practice. The AirPods max do sound excellent and I do think that "lossless" audio is a bit overrated, a high quality AAC file can sound quite amazing. So personally, I am more interested in the spatial audio which is fully supported. But considering that some people think that lossless audio is important it is not understandable that the Apple flagship headphones which just have been released do not support it.

The problem seems to be with the data rate that is possible over Bluetooth, isn’t it?

Yes, for wireless mode bluetooth is probably the limitation. They could have supported data via lightning cable, if they had wanted it, but currently only analog audio is supported via a custom lightning cable.

That custom lightning cable is 3.5mm on the other end, so it’s not surprising that it’s analog-only. What is apparently surprising to some people is that the headphones re-digitize the analog signal before processing the signal (and eventually converting back to analog for the actual headphone drivers). Personally, that isn’t too surprising to me for noise-cancelling headphones, although I have no idea if it’s the case with other noise-canceling headphones that accept analog input.

Some wireless headphones works passively with 3.5mm without power on. In my experience, MDR-1ABT works great maybe because it's just BT version of MDR-1A, but WH-1000XM3 and Beoplay H9i (both NC) work bad maybe because it's not optimized for it. I wonder there are any NC headphones works great for both.

But isn’t analog audio identical to lossless?

Not when the headphones re-digitize the analog signal, which I suspect is how they are designed to support the signal processing and noise cancellation features.

But as soon as signal processing and noise cancellation enter the picture, there will be signal loss. So even if lossless could be transmitted wirelessly, there will be loss due to signal processing.

At most what could be gained is one less ad/da conversion to go through.

The the question presents itself, why not buy wired analog headphones in the first place.

I think the audiophile testers are usually more concerned about the sound-stage than they are about the compression considering the market the Airpod Max's are aimed at - particularly for Bluetooth Headphones.

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