In a press release, Apple has announced that its over-the-ear AirPods Max headphones will soon support lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio:
With this update, AirPods Max will unlock 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio, preserving the integrity of original recordings and allowing listeners to experience music the way the artist created it in the studio. Lossless audio also extends to Personalized Spatial Audio to deliver a more sonically accurate, uncompressed, and immersive experience, and users can enjoy more than 100 million songs in lossless audio with Apple Music.
Apple says the new capabilities will arrive in April via a firmware update alongside iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4. The update applies only to the USB-C version of AirPods Max released in September 2024—owners of the original Lightning models are out of luck. While the AirPods Max remain both expensive ($549) and relatively bulky, the addition of lossless audio support and ultra-low latency at least provides more justification for the premium price point and larger size. Notably, Apple’s offhand mention of “using the USB-C cable” means that taking advantage of these new features requires being tethered to your audio source. Don’t miss Nick Heer’s “absurd timeline” of support for lossless audio in AirPods.
This is why it is so annoying seeing articles praising a future port-less iPhone.
Wild speculation:
Bluetooth doesn’t have the bandwidth for lossless audio
AirPods Pro and AirPods 4 support lossless audio, but only when paired with Vision Pro, via some proprietary protocol
This implies that as of yet, no other Apple device has the hardware to support this protocol. (Or, Apple is not ready to admit that it does)
My guess is that what Apple is doing is using Ultra Wideband (UWB) in some frequency that only has enough bandwidth at very short range. Such as the distance between the Vision Pro and your ears.
Lacking device support, the only way to get lossless audio is via a cable connection. Which is nothing to crow about; my iPhones have had lossless audio to my headphones going back dozens of years: via a 3.5mm headphone jack, Lightning, and USB-C.
LOL. I think, then, I’m gonna stick with my (audio professional favorite) Sony MDR-7506s that add very little “color” to source material and—bonus!—cost less than a hundred bucks.
Yes, indeed. Apple at its very best, parcelling out table stakes features as though finest whiskey.
It’ll be interesting to see how this is implemented, though. Is it just going to be USB audio class? I can see the case for substituting these for some other travel headphones if your options increase as a result of this support—that’s value I’d not scoff at.
Hmm. 9to5Mac is saying that the previous Lightning-based AirPods Max supported wired listening as if that was a good thing.
And Jason Snell says that they supported lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio when tethered like that, but I haven’t been able to confirm that—there’s no mention of it on the AirPods Max tech specs page for the Lightning model.
I have to admit that I don’t actually care much since I wouldn’t pay $550 for a pair of headphones that I anticipate would be uncomfortable just so I could listen to lossless audio that would likely sound the same to me as lossy audio.
But I’m sure serious audio professionals will appreciate it.
Lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio will be available in April as a free firmware update with iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 for AirPods Max with USB-C."
Which I gather means my three years old Lightning AirPods Max are not supported…
Adam, I would guess that serious audio pros will be using Sennheiser Pro, AudioTechnica or other “sound engineer” quality studio gear. I was just in a pro’s home studio and a corded Sennheiser Pro headset was on each mixer board, and in the sound booth and equipment stage area. Apple might be present in the software and hardware used, but not the headphones.
One the subject of sound, earbuds and iPhones, do you use the Apple’s built-in noise generation that is in the Settings/Accessibility/Audio & Visual/Background Sounds ?
There are choices for Balanced noise, Bright noise, Dark Noise, Ocean, Rain, Stream, Night and Fire. Bright Noise (I expect Apple name for White Noise) was selected and played while charging so I could fall asleep in a Hotel room. Within minutes, I could pick out a loop! I mean, 3-4 seconds a faint tone of sort repeated. I tried changing to Dark Noise and within minutes, I could faintly here a tone repeat. I then turned off the sounds to see if I was overly-sensitive to some other noise like another’s room or appliance. Nope. I started the background sounds again and … there it was.
I don’t think this is a generator but perhaps some stored audio clips, looped. When you want a constant, unchanging noise, you don’t want a loop (e.g. a vertical fan on medium will be constant until obstructed, bearing failure or power changes). I used to listen to some youtube clips that one was of an airconditioner that was rated at 8 hours. You could hear the loop edit as though it was a few minutes then just looped for up to 8 hours.
A telling sign for those of us in the pursuit of silence…and the eventual loss of hearing.
Back in the days before CDs, i used to record my LPs to cassette tapes (Type II with Dolby C), shelve the LP, then use my Nakamichi to play the tapes. But once in awhile I’d play a retail cassette. These sounded terrible – they have very poor high end frequency cut-off (about 16Khz) plus a lot of noise.
I’d apologize for the poor sound to whoever was listening in the dorm room. But what surprised me was they couldn’t hear it. As far as they could tell, it sounded just fine.
I don’t know why. I don’t think I have special ears. We were all college students so it wasn’t age related hearing degradation. Maybe they just never heard what a high quality recording sounded like.
I’ve posted about this very phenomenon in the past; perhaps you might enjoy having a look at the hyperlinks…
————— I believe the way people perceive sound quality is highly influenced by the format and by the device they used to listen to music when their tastes were forming.
Those who began by listening to MP3s played through laptop speakers or cheap earbuds might feel lossless AACs on an iMac’s speakers sound pretty good. Similarly, I grew up listening mostly to records. So anything on vinyl sounds warm and inviting to me. But somebody who loves megabass and wants maxed-out levels on everything probably prefers CDs or uncompressed digital files.
For anybody interested in doing a deep dive on this stuff, this is a cool book:
“In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician.”
Now, here’s what early 1900s recordings actually sound like:
My history belies that a little bit. I wasn’t exposed to much music until I was 15, and then at 16, I was fortunate enough to get what you might call an entry-level audiophile system (JVC amp/receiver with a 5-band EQ, Infinity Qa speakers, JVC turntable with Ortofon cartridge). I listened to it intensively with both speakers and headphones, and annoyed retailers with repeated returns of back-catalog albums with substandard pressings that included crackle in quiet passages. I invested in a turntable dust mat and a Discwasher cleaning system and kept my albums religiously clean. Sometimes I replaced the sleeves with non-static sleeves when the paper sleeves seemed too chinsy. And for my cassette system, I regularly used both a head clearner and a demagnitizer. My basic goal was to minimize any noise not present in the recording studio: a goal that I could approach on vinyl, but not so much with cassettes. (Using metal oxide tape and Dolby C came closest.) To this day, when I hear sampled vinyl as part of a modern track, the dusty noise that’s so fashionble to include drives me up the frickin’ wall.
So I eagerly embraced CDs when they came out, especially the DDD issues that were recorded and mixed digitally. Some of the first CDs, with AAD, were very clumsily and amateurishly issued, even by big labels. I remember that the first CD issue of the Clash’s London Calling had two-second gaps between tracks that ran seamlessly together on the vinyl issue, which seems so far beyond forgivable that it’s not even understandable. But by the early 1990s, new DDDs and ADD reissues were the norm, and standards were acceptably high. I missed, and still miss, the care that used to go into the physical presentation of vinyl LPs, and the artful consideration of sequencing that went into albums that couldn’t be easily skipped around. But CDs better suit my need for a reliably clean sound, and for me the many advantages of digital recordings in general outweigh the lack of the unpinpointable “warm” sound of traditional analog media.
Whether it matters to me or not that I can listen to a truly lossless signal on Apple’s flagship headphones, should I ever buy a pair, remains to be seen. I have noticed that when I stream losseless music via AirPlay 2 directly to my Yamaha receiver and play it through my Klipsch floor-standing speakers, it’s damned hard to say it doesn’t sound as nice as it would have 45 years ago coming from vinyl and my Infinity Qas.
