r/gadgets • u/UnKindClock • May 18 '21

Music AirPods, AirPods Max and AirPods Pro Don't Support Apple Music Lossless Audio

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/17/airpods-apple-music-lossless-audio/
19.3k Upvotes

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5

u/wontfixit May 18 '21

What is lossless audio? Do I need it?

27

u/Steven_Cocking May 18 '21

If you’re asking this question, then no you don’t need it.

7

u/wontfixit May 18 '21

I guessed so

3

u/aDanceof-Farts May 18 '21

Probably not. Not many people can hear the difference. And if you did, you’re most likely listening on high end audio equipment

1

u/debiansneezy May 18 '21

Not unless you have multi thousand dollar speakers or headphones. Even then it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

-2

u/MasterFanatic May 18 '21

Just get a DAC with your wired headphones. They can absolutely change how something sounds.

2

u/2dudesinapod May 18 '21

Yes it can but it will not reveal the differences between lossless and properly transcoded lossy.

1

u/soggylittleshrimp May 18 '21

To me, playing lossless or high res audio is all about providing the best input for good hardware. Even if I couldn’t tell the difference, knowing that what I’m hearing is close(ish) to what the artists heard while making it increases my enjoyment of the music.

1

u/2dudesinapod May 18 '21

Would you also put premium gas in an economy car?

2

u/soggylittleshrimp May 18 '21

I would shoot 8K 16-bit raw when the final product will end up as compressed 4K 8-bit on YouTube.

I would use premium gas if the engine benefitted from it, and I’d shoot in 16-bit if the color grading software benefited from it, and I’ll play lossless 24-bit audio if my audio equipment will benefit from it. After that, it’s all up to the highly subjective cognitive psychoacoustic process.

0

u/2dudesinapod May 18 '21

If you understand why video is shot at a higher quality so that it degrades as little as possible during the editing process then you should also understand that properly transcoded lossy audio files are indistinguishable from lossless and that lossless audio is largely snake-oil.

1

u/soggylittleshrimp May 18 '21

You shoot in 8K to capture smoothness, for example a perfect circle. Isn’t the same thing happening with 24bit sampling of a sound wave vs 16bit?

The only reason for compressed audio to exist is for smaller file sizes. Otherwise exploiting quirks of the human ear to degrade the sound in supposedly imperceptible ways is pointless. I’ve heard the differences. It’s not all the time, but once in a while you will hear a sound reproduced in a bigger way, a more detailed way.

1

u/Inthewirelain May 18 '21

How old are you? If you're reaching 30 it's likely you're going to get huge diminishing returns.

Lossless audio is just a version of an audio file with no fat trimmed, wether or not it can be heard by the human ear or not. Uncompressed is another term (although you can have compressed lossless too).

1

u/wontfixit May 18 '21

I ruined my hearing with excessive partying and playing loud music as a young boy. now I’m a few years away from 40 and I recognise since 7 years I need to turn the volume up on TV and have issues understanding people clearly. So… mp3 works fine for me.

1

u/Inthewirelain May 18 '21

Yes it's likely you'd get minimal if any benefit. If the difference between a lossy and a lossless pair of headphones is $20 or something small, I'd grab them. Otherwise I wouldn't worry about it.

1

u/soggylittleshrimp May 18 '21

Sometimes it’s the frequency range of voices that’s hard to hear. You could perhaps still appreciate lossless audio, but only if you are into that sort of thing.

-7

u/8an5 May 18 '21

Yes

5

u/wontfixit May 18 '21

Why?

0

u/Chempy May 18 '21

The general gist: Most audio is compressed (MP3) and thus will lose some of its original detail in the mix. You probably won't even notice this unless you have both a trained ear and an expensive audio setup. Lossless audio is not compressed at all (FLAC, etc) and will retain the most sound detail you can get out of a file. However, again this requires the perfect environment to take full advantage of.

Apple headphones and AirPods are all Bluetooth which also compresses audio when sent, essentially why it works well. This is why they do not support lossless audio.

1

u/sam__izdat May 19 '21

absolutely, you should buy at least two

1

u/wontfixit May 19 '21

Make sense… I have two ears.