Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Lossless Audio
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
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?)
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.
but I have not found a single place in the US that uses it
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.
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
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.
"They work sufficiently" is already a high bar given experiences people had with earlier wireless headphones. They were also the very first reliable detached (split ear) headphones. And they added excellent ANC (at least in the Pro version).
As for being "bleached and molded plastic" what else would they be? Wood? Metal and genuine leather?
The only perceptual difference is that apple special-cases airpod management to ease switching of devices. They trash their own product by making such consumer-hostile ux obvious.
But for me there's just no going back - it's that big of a difference. I'll happily pay any price to have a wire-free experience. It's just magical, especially as someone who lives in a city and walks a lot / takes the subway / plays sports / spends time in the gym / etc.
Anyway, you can simply not run into stuff with a wire. There's nothing you can do about bluetooth glitching out randomly for five seconds. Not to mention playing the "what device is playing into my headphones" game. Wireless is for people who don't care.
Sure you can. Buy a quality headphone and transmitter device. Never had a BT issue with several airpod models (v1, v2, pro) and an iPhone for 7+ years. And I'm pretty sure most other brands have solved this by now too.
Just try what most buy and report positive experience with. Do a test drive and return if not satisfied. Try a friend's device.
It's not rocket science.
I had plenty of wired sets where you had to hold the cable just so in order to get audio to play through. Happened a ton with those cheap crappy skullcandy earbuds, but would also eventually happen with the higher quality stuff too.
Idk if you just became accustomed to it or what but it was my biggest pet peeve with wired headphones
fun fact: the 1/8th jack was never an issue with making a phone water resistant. It doesn't need to expose the internals any more than USB-C does (actually, even less).
The industry lives on selling units. A technology that "is not up to it" and can have several iterations re-sold as improved versions is the very thing the industry prays to God for.
I just pray we are not stuck with current versions of bluetooth in perpetuity. What a nightmare.
Since APPL and the rest have trillion dollar market caps, it appears to work fine so far
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
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
According to what you're saying, I think it's just about possible. M51's spiral features are 20 arcseconds, and you can apparently resolve 15...
And turns out M51, the easiest spiral galaxy to view, would have been directly overhead Stonehenge (the best viewing position).
So... Might be somethin' for you to try, if you ever get somewhere extremely dark and perfectly clear?
M51: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22m51%22&t=ffab&atb=v340-1&iax=im...
Newgrange: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=newgrange+spirals&atb=v340-...
As far as I can tell though, making out the actual spiral features of another galaxy is generally assumed to be impossible... And I don't think it actually is, for someone like yourself.
Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, will be able to hear a difference, assuming there aren’t mastering differences in the tracks. If you take a 24/192k track and downsample it to 16/48k, nobody will be able to tell. Ever.
Cymbals used to be the hallmark of terrible MP3 encoding artifacts, but they seem better on AAC.
Overkill makes good marketing. People largely just want to feel like they're getting the best.
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.
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_...
The problem is that with enough testing, you're very likely to get statistically significant results just by chance.
For me it's very easy to tell the difference between regular AAC and Hi-Res lossless.
And I have been blind testing every day for years now as my streams switch quality when I go from Cellular to WiFi.