24 ms·
AirPods Max and AirPods Pro Don't Support Apple Music Lossless, Apple Confirms
- threatofrain 5y agoApparently lossless streaming cannot be supported on the newest bluetooth spec, and will probably require some kind of wired headphones for the near future.
- everdrive 5y agoMeanwhile, my computer-with-regular-speakers-attached continues to support anything you could imagine.
- tantalor 5y agoNot that you'll be able to tell the difference
- reificator 5y agoExcellent. I'll bring your computer-with-regular-speakers-attached with me on my next bus ride.
- everdrive 5y agoYou joke, that's a laptop and headphones!
- stinos 5y agoThat would be inconvenient. However there's a lot of portable-player-with-regular-wired-headphones which might suite you. Even comes in the form of a smartphone.
- hbosch 5y agoIt'd be impossible to "enjoy" lossless audio on a bus ride in the audiophile sense.
- Orochikaku 5y agoIsn't it a little ridiculous to compare wireless headphones to wired speakers?
- alpaca128 5y agoSure, but take it a bit less literally and you have wireless vs. wired heaphones. Same thing: wired headphones will just play anything you throw at them. Meanwhile wireless ones cost more, have a more limited bandwidth, sometimes require an app for settings, and are built to fail after a few years thanks to proprietary batteries. We have the tech to solve all these issues. But that wouldn't be as profitable.
- renewiltord 5y agoIt’s just a trade off in product design man. This isn’t some Phoebus cartel shit from Apple. They just made a trade off.
- alpaca128 5y agoI'm not saying it's a cartel. But you can't tell me manufacturers stopped making batteries swappable in notebooks, phones, headphones and many other devices for much other than planned obsolescence. Of course they always make up some other excuse, but it's very obvious e.g. the Surface Laptop wasn't made impossible to repair for technical reasons. It's plain as day why certain design decisions are made, and calling it a tradeoff might not be wrong, but it's clearly too kind to these practices.
- renewiltord 5y agoI’m unfamiliar with the Surface but the unusual shape of the MacBook batteries is intentional so that it can fill almost all room. This does make it hard to also make it user serviceable.
- alpaca128 5y ago
- twobitshifter 5y agoI don’t think your speakers are going to respond to 192 kHZ. Even if you could get the data to the speakers at that rate they aren’t designed for it.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 5y agoDoes Bluetooth support binary transfer? Why can’t it be just a dumb wireless data transfer protocol. Instead you have profiles and lossy compression. Turn on a mic and the quality drops to phone quality 30 years ago.
- tedunangst 5y agoIt's not infinite bandwidth.
- Google234 5y agoIt has plenty of bandwidth. MB/s
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Kirby64 5y agoSource? The only option that I'm aware of that exists in Bluetooth spec is an optional add-on that basically initiates an 802.11 (WiFi) ad-hoc link for faster transfer. Not really suitable for audio. Max bandwidth for regular Bluetooth is around 3 Mbit/s, to my knowledge. Bluetooth LE is lower at 2 Mbit/s.
- js2 5y ago2 Mbit/s is the physical bit rate using LE 2M. After accounting for protocol overhead, the max data rate is about 1.4 Mbps. https://www.novelbits.io/bluetooth-5-speed-maximum-throughput/ https://www.novelbits.io/bluetooth-5-speed-maximum-throughpu...
- aidenn0 5y agoCoincidentally (or not?) That's the bitrate of uncompressed CDDA. I suspect the real-word data rate is lower though. In any event 300kbps is more than sufficient for transparent compression of audio and, if the source is lossless, then you shouldn't have recompression artifacts. Doing so in real-time does have costs (low latency compression uses both more CPU time and ends up with higher bitrates than when you allow more latency)
- bydo 5y agoThe AirPods Max digitize wired input with a 48kHz sample rate for processing, so even using the ($29!) cable won't deliver any sort of benefit from this.
- sethhochberg 5y ago"Lossless" just means there is no (lossy perceptual) compression involved. You could absolutely have a 48khz lossless signal, or even 44.1khz if you were dealing with a CD rip, and it would likely still measure better than the lossy equivalent audio sent over AAC or aptX via Bluetooth. I'll skip the whole debate about how good perceptual lossy encodings actually are these days and whether any person could reasonably expect to hear that measured difference, but just wanted to clarify that the sample rate of the headphones' built-in ADC shouldn't be conflated with the lossless codec.
- bydo 5y agoWell, yeah. There are two parts to this, the lossless compression and the "HiFi" sample rate (it goes up to 24-bit 192kHz). I was just pointing out that you don't get the high sample rate even over analog. I haven't seen anywhere whether AirPods can do 192kHz AAC over Bluetooth, which in my opinion would be more interesting. I assume not if all of the DSP stuff is done at 48kHz.
- Someone1234 5y agoIf this is accurate then Bluetooth continues to disappoint. Bluetooth reminds me a lot of the F-35: Designed to do everything, does none of it particularly well, hard to build/maintain, and frankly would have been better off as three or four competing standards that did their "thing" well and nothing else. Might be time to retire it, do a clean sheet audio-only standard, that is easy enough to implement/re-implement with actual tests for all the functionality.
- selfhoster11 5y ago> Bluetooth reminds me a lot of the F-35: Designed to do everything, does none of it particularly well, hard to build/maintain, and frankly would have been better off as three or four competing standards that did their "thing" well and nothing else. Hard disagree. Bluetooth has an important disadvantage, in that its quality is bad. But it's also got an important advantage: it works, at all. Basically anything made from early 00s onwards will be able to connect to a modern pair of Bluetooth headphones. Interop is the selling feature.
- arcticbull 5y agoThat's true of 'classic' bluetooth, but not of LE. LE is legitimately good. Source: Implemented a couple of LE devices. There's no shared heritage between LE and Classic, just the branding in common.
- oblio 5y agoWhat are the bandwidth and range for LE in practice?
- arcticbull 5y ago2Mbits PHY as of 5.0, which in reality means ~175kB/sec across uplink and downlink - maximum. Range is very good, 100-300 feet in open conditions.
- 5y ago
- Google234 5y agoI don’t get this, blue tooth has plenty of bandwidth... why for example, can’t it play duel channel audio along with a mic?
- hbosch 5y agoI think the tradeoff is often quality:latency. The higher the quality, the bigger the buffer, and the longer the latency? In anecdotal data, I noticed that my Bluetooth headphones had latency so bad they were not usable for gaming (CS:GO, Valorant). Switching the codec to aptX reduced latency noticable but also dramatically reduced quality to somewhere similar to a phone call (flat, noisy). So that's my assumption.
- drdaeman 5y agoIs Apple really concerned with the latency, though? Playing audio on a Homepod used to have huge latency, we're talking about 2 seconds lag, and it still had the sales. Sure thing, they have improved this with Airplay 2 but nonetheless... I'm not sure how big of the concern latency is for the music streaming (not for the video, calls or games).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bredren 5y agoWhy does the lossless playback need to be streaming though? This is the fundamental mistake in the analysis of why the AirPods max lack the ability to support this service offering. The headphones should have gigs of buffer and be able to manage lossless with a great UX to support this. People are already used to buffer waits for streaming video and this is already a niche use case.
- jaywalk 5y agoI'm not sure how "wait a few minutes to hear the song you just hit play on" could possibly translate to "great UX"
- bredren 5y agoIt isn’t ideal but this isn’t for average playback. Assuming even mediocre speeds, an average album in ALAC is likely around 350 MB. That’s about 32 minutes at 1.4Mbps. They could start listening around the 17 minute mark and remain uninterrupted. I suspect most APM owners would happily load the music to the headphones in advance to perform this playback. This seems so obvious to me, that I suspect it is held back by licensing issues more than cost reasons. The playing device would need to do a good job with the interface but this is not a big ask—-people have been buffering for media they want since RealAudio.
- duskwuff 5y agoNo. Absolutely not. AirPods are headphones, not a music player. A device that you have to "load music" onto isn't a set of headphones anymore -- and the features you're describing would add significantly to the cost of an already expensive device.
- rasz 5y agoNo. True Lossless Audio streaming could work wine on BT, even newest LE has excess bw to support it (BT 5 - 2Mbit/s). What it cant support is losslessly streaming Ultrasonic audio intended for Bats (and batshit crazy audiophools).
- cush 5y agoWho hurt you?
- edhelas 5y agoHaving wireless headphones: Cons: - Battery to charge - Battery that is reduced after a few years - Pairing with devices issues - Lower quality of the sound due to the Bluetooth recompression Pros: - No cable I'll keep my cable headphones :)
- lopis 5y agoThe main con of cable headphones for most users of apple music is: no place to plug then. It's preciously hilarious.
- BubbleeTea 5y agoThere's still lightning jack you can use! This is no different than most android devices.
- matwood 5y agoStop getting in the way of bad jokes with facts!
- unethical_ban 5y agoYou may not like the dongle, but accept it.
- tashoecraft 5y agoPros: Cable doesn't get snagged when person sitting next to you gets up on the subway, ripping them out of my ears. I can connect them to my phone, tablet, tv easily and move around the house without the device. There's perfectly valid reason to have wireless headphones.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoEven around the house wireless can be an advantage. I don't mind being tethered when I'm at my desk, but I'm not always at my desk and wires running to a phone can be a real nuisance, getting snagged on drawer handles and tempting pet chewing.
- switz 5y agoApple took our headphone jacks, then gave us lossless audio. How generous. My 6s is starting to show its wear, unfortunately. I don't expect it, but I truly hope the next iPhone has a headphone jack. People want airpods whether or not their phones have headphone jacks, it was insecure to take it away in the first place. Have some faith in your products. On the plus side, I often get to pick the music in my friends' cars.
- hnuser123456 5y agohttps://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35-mm-headphone-jack-adapter https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...
- mmebane 5y agoI have a couple of those, and they work fine. The only downside is you can't use wired charging and wired headphones at the same time unless you use a third-party splitter, none of which have great reviews. The MagSafe charger kind of solves this, since it's at least easy to pick up with the charger attached, but MagSafe chargers are more expensive than Lightning cables, and the official one has a very short cord. In my dream world, the iPhone would have two Lightning (or USB-C) ports, but I don't expect that to ever happen.
- fuzzer37 5y agoI think I'll keep using my phone where I don't need a dongle to listen to headphones.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> People want airpods whether or not their phones have headphone jacks Are you suggesting that Apple removed the jack in order to sell AirPods? Seems a bit cynical and doesn't even make sense. I think they removed it for engineering and design reasons. If you need it back there's an official adapter that costs just a few dollars.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
- DIVx0 5y agoIt feels like Apple released the lossless Apple Music update prematurely. I'd expect them to do the lossless update at the same time as introducing a refresh of their high end gear that is able to take advantage of the upgrade. If my speculation is correct, did they do it early to get the jump on another platform? That also does not seem like an Apple style move.
- tomkarlo 5y agoSpotify hi-fi was announced a few months ago and is launching soon.
- arvinsim 5y agoIt's not a good look for them. It looks like they are afraid that Spotify will solidify its position.
- Marsymars 5y agoRough for Spotify - since Apple is including theirs at no extra cost, it becomes tough for Spotify to justify charging extra for it. So it goes from a feature that makes them money, to a feature that instead costs them money in engineering resources and bandwidth, before they even release it.
- tomkarlo 5y agoThat depends if you believe Spotify users will switch to Apple just for that feature... if they won't, Spotify can likely still charge extra for it. Folks are pretty tied in to ecosystems at this point: if you've bought audio hardware that supports Spotify but not Apple, you're not going to switch.
- cactus2093 5y agoIt's been long reported that Apple has been undergoing a strategic shift to put more focus on their services business, and this seems like some more evidence of that. It's certainly a very "non-Apple" thing to do based on how they've operated for the past 2 decades. The release of lossless audio and the upcoming release of Apple Music on Android are two major features that add zero value or lock-in pressure for Apple hardware but add real value for subscribers of Apple Music. Maybe their services teams are finally starting to be given leeway to operate as real businesses and do things to grow their revenue rather than just operate as growth channels for Apple hardware as they always have in the past.
- float4 5y agoApple lossless goes up to 24bits at 192KHz, which is over 4mbps. I believe bluetooth 5.x only supports 2mbps, although I'm not sure. According to wikipedia, Apple did file a patent in 2019 for high bandwidth low latency audio streaming over bluetooth (up to 8mbps)[0]. Looks like they've been working on this for a while. [0] https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0104424.html https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0104424.html
- qmmmur 5y agoThat is just so unbelievably overkill. Especially the sample rate.
- millzlane 5y agoOverkill is the perfect amount of kill for audiophiles.
- dwighttk 5y agoMight not be enough. Have you seen the gold plated overkill?
- Hamuko 5y agoGold plated is far from overkill. Maybe not even cable risers (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/fb/05/3cfb059ec7fde97d409068ba867e83a3.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/fb/05/3cfb059ec7fde97d4090...) are overkill in the audiophile community. Maybe not even your personal electricity pylon (https://thevinylfactory.com/news/japanese-audiophiles-personal-utility-pole/ https://thevinylfactory.com/news/japanese-audiophiles-person...) is overkill.
- jolux 5y agoYou joke but I wouldn't want to risk dirtying $10,000 cables by putting them on the floor.
- 5y ago
- polyterative 5y agoPathetic
- neya 5y agoMy Sony XM3 supports LDAC which is near-lossless and it was released a couple of years ago. No matter what you think, I can't justify a so called $600 "premium" wireless headphone not even attempt to support something close to lossless no matter how you put it. I really hope there's something Apple can do about this via software, otherwise, as an audiophile this is just full of compromises - all the way from requiring a case just to charge it, to the easy to slip from fingers design, to the smaller driver size (40mm) and now to not supporting lossless formats.
- techdragon 5y agoI’m just going to say it… it was a stupid feature to “announce” the way they did. It should have been a bullet point mentioned in passing at WWDC… assuming they had anything at all about the Apple Music APIs to mention. This isn’t something enough people care enough about to generate hype or growth, releasing it out on its own just allowed them to draw attention in isolation which has cast it in a less than ideal light due to its shortcomings. If they new (and they obviously did) that it was supported in such a statistically limited (percentage wise) subset when compared to their overall customer base’s listening habits… then making any fuss at all was kind of stupid. They now have the unforced error of having high value customers buying their most expensive products asking uncomfortable questions like “why did you sell me $1000 headphones that don’t support your best stuff?”
- twobitshifter 5y agoTidal, Amazon Music HD, and Spotify hifi are all services aimed at selling higher fidelity Music at higher prices. Apple gives this away and they should just make it a bullet point?
- _ph_ 5y agoWhile I can understand that bluetooth limits the data transmission rate, now it becomes even more puzzling that the AirPods Max don't support data transmission via lightning cable. With that they could fully support lossless and high res audio in full quality. How can Apple release such expensive, some people even used the word "overpriced" headphones without that features, especially with the new tiers of Apple Music coming?
- herodoturtle 5y agoI tend to agree with this. For me the holy grail is USB-C powered earbuds with active noise cancelling. That way I don't have to worry about battery running out either. I often work for 10+ hours and 4 hours of battery on AirPods pro frustrates me when I have to regularly charge them during the day. Then with USB-C could also get superior audio quality than Bluetooth. I'm considering getting the Bose QC20 as a compromise. But still... they're also somewhat battery dependent.
- nucleardog 5y agoFor what it’s worth, I’ve got the Bose QC35 and regardless of whatever the battery claims are, I often get multiple working days out of them. They also have a pretty light clamping force compared to most over ear headphones I have or have used, so even with glasses they’re quite comfortable to wear all day. And if the batteries do run out, they still work as headphones (sans ANC) with a cable. The QC20 kinda seem like the worst of all worlds for me. Wired so you’ve got cables to catch on things, battery-dependant, in-ear…
- herodoturtle 5y agoI've got the QC35ii as well and absolutely love them. Best comfort and ANC. But I'm specifically looking for earbuds with good ANC. I've got puffy hair and when I take the QC35s off my flattened valley hairdo looks absolutely ridiculous :-) AirPods pro have good ANC - almost as good as QC35 - but their battery life is too short. And it's just for desk use; so I don't mind if they're wired. Hope that helps explain my context! I sound like an absolute fusspot.
- joeyblueee 5y agoMaybe buletooth‘s max bandwith is not enough for lossless audio?
- andix 5y agoI don't believe you would hear the difference. There are probably some special cases where you may hear the difference, but it wouldn't be significant. If you want to listen to music in highest possible quality, AirPods are for sure the wrong device. Probably also the AirPods Max. You would use some very high end wired sound system or headphones, to get a very small difference for a lot of money :)
- chrisseaton 5y ago> I don't believe you would hear the difference. You absolutely can - the iPhone actually has a demo on it you can try moving your head around and the difference is extremely clear - it's not some audiophile thing.
- DHPersonal 5y agoAre you referencing spatial audio? I don’t see how lossless audio benefits from having the listener move their head.
- chrisseaton 5y agoYes spatial audio - you can definitely hear the difference.
- cheeze 5y agoAbsolutely, nobody is talking about spatial audio in this thread though...
- plexicle 5y agoI think you're confusing the spatial audio feature with the lossless one. They're two separate things.
- chrisseaton 5y agoRight, but you can hear the spatial audio feature (the parent comment didn't say they were just talking about lossless.)
- annoyingnoob 5y agoApples loves to make something new/cool and then make it obsolete a year later. Honestly, frustrating as an Apple customer. Just when I jump to your new product you make it useless by changing something. Tech should be designed to last years, not months.
- threatofrain 5y agoWhich Apple devices are most notable as part of the story of next-year deprecation? And won't compressed streaming still be the norm for almost everyone in the world for a very long time?
- KingOfCoders 5y agoYour power adapter. I have so many I could build a house from them. A small one at least.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tempoponet 5y agoWhat do you mean? In 20 years they changed the laptop power adapter twice and the iPod/phone adapter once. iPad is the worst (2 in ~8 years) since it arrived late in the ipod connector life and adopted usb-c early. In iPad's case it aligned with similarly positioned products and was generally a good upgrade. Compare to other laptops which never had a standard adapter, phones which were also not standard until they moved 3 times in ~8-10 years from barrel jacks to mini-usb to micro-usb and now usb-c.
- KingOfCoders 5y agoI don't have a source but owned MBPs and Airs from the first up until USB-C, and I had more than 3 different power adapters including USB-C for them. But you may be right and I remember differently. But I might confuse those with display adapters.
- xd1936 5y agoBluetooth AirPods don't really surprise me, but the fact that the $349 HomePod and HomePod Mini also don't support it is strange indeed.
- EveYoung 5y agoDo you really expect to notice a difference on a HomePod? Most people have difficulties differentiating 128kbps mp3s from lossless using high-end hardware.
- boringg 5y agoHow sweet would have it been if it was retroactively supported!
- maxwellito 5y ago"Courage".
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoAlmost feels like the music services exec hasn't been talking to the music hardware exec. Seems absurd to launch a service where your $550 headphones launched just a few weeks ago don't even support the difference.
- js2 5y agoThere doesn't seem to be enough bandwidth, not even with BT 5.0's 2 Mbps LE 2M which just barely ekes out 1400 kbps after accounting for protocol overhead, just below CD audio's 1411 kbps data rate for 2-channel 16 bit 44.1 kHz LPCM. https://www.novelbits.io/bluetooth-5-speed-maximum-throughput/ https://www.novelbits.io/bluetooth-5-speed-maximum-throughpu... Unless ALAC can consistently keep the data rate below 1400 kbps, I don't see how it's possible to have lossless audio over today's BT standards. And keep in mind that CD-quality is the lowest tier of Apple's new offering. Apple filed a patent a few years ago for something called "high data rate" (HDR) that's capable of 8 Mbps. Maybe something will come of that eventually. https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0104424.html https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0104424.html
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- obenn 5y agoSlightly related, can anyone recommend a good DAC in order to take advantage of lossless?
- PascLeRasc 5y agoI think the iFi Nano iDSD is the best I’ve ever heard. The DAC/amp combination is incredibly clean. It has MQA, I don’t use that though, but if you wanted to it’s there. The Rode AI-1 is a great desktop-only option too, also a fantastic DAC/headphone amp. It just bothered me because it allows digital volume control so you’d have to make it an aggregate device in OS X audio settings to disable that.
- major505 5y agoWeel I don't think any bluetooth headphone would work with that. I don't know how it works with headpones, but Douby Atmos you need at least 7 good speakers to make it work well in a movie: * Front left * Front right * center * surround pair. * back pair. Also you need a Subwoofer and if you gonna implement a perfect set, you still need 4 ceiling speakers to have the full effect. This cost of entry is the reason I still didn't put it in my house.
- zlsa 5y agoLossless audio isn't the same as Dolby Atmos, which does work with AirPods Max and AirPods Pro.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> you need at least 7 good speakers to make it work well in a movie You don't - they use head-related transfer function filters (the Fourier transform of head-related impulse response) to make it work from a single pair of speakers.
- lnanek2 5y agoStrangely enough, Apple's most advanced ear pods/headphones and the like change the audio you hear as you move your head. Kind of gimmicky, but they do technically have a way to render spatial audio even though they only have two speakers.
- patrickthebold 5y agoSerious question: You only have 2 ears so theoretically headphones should be able to produce the same experience as 7 speakers in a room. I imagine that is a hard problem, but is my understanding correct? Anyone know how hard this is?
- twobitshifter 5y agoThat’s exactly what spatial audio is doing.
- 5y ago
- cfcf14 5y agoThis is a really baffling decision from Apple - normally they're very good about having tightly integrated ecosystems where everything just 'works' with everything else. That's kinda the entire value proposition in my eyes.
- wmeredith 5y ago> normally they're very good about having tightly integrated ecosystems where everything just 'works' with everything else As a long time Apple user (since the 90's), I feel like this hasn't been true in a while. The number one exhibit is the dongle-hell they've been putting their customers through for the last 5 years. I have a watch, phone, headphones, a computer, and a tablet by Apple. All were made in the last two years. I have to carry a handful of different cables and power adapters if I want to charge them all. It's a huge pain in the ass and is FAR from the definition of "just works".
- ascagnel_ 5y agoThey put out a $130 (!) charger that charges both phones (or anything else on Qi, including some of their wireless headphones) and watches[0], yet that uses their proprietary Lightning cable, not USB-C, so if you bring a tablet/laptop, you're still stuck needing to bring a second cable and possibly a second charger with you. [0] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHXF3AM/A/magsafe-duo-charger https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHXF3AM/A/magsafe-duo-cha...
- CydeWeys 5y agoMeanwhile, over here in non-Apple land, I bring a single high wattage USB-C charger with me when I travel, which is sufficient to charge my laptop, phone, and headphones. Then I have tiny 1' USB-A bridge cables that I use to charge my other devices through my laptop (Kindle, battery pack, smartwatch). All pretty simple, all dirt cheap cables, no dongles.
- sangnoir 5y ago
- JoshTko 5y agoShould clearly note that the Max does support over a cable connection.
- raverbashing 5y agoAnd there we have it, a feature that you can pay for, but is unable to use in its full capability. So please tell me again how the wired headphone plugs were "deprecated" and "outdated" and that wireless audio was the future.
- periheli0n 5y agoFunny that adding a feature (lossless) to Music backfires for Apple, because physical laws and Bluetooth standards prevent it from working with their wireless headphones.
- StartupTree 5y agoCan someone answer a basic question for me? I have an old iPhone SE (2016). It has a headphone jack. Does this mean my old iPhone can play lossless music but the latest iPhones can't?
- benlivengood 5y agoCan anyone appreciate lossless audio quality on earbuds? It's not like the frequency response is flat across the range of human hearing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- samgranieri 5y agoI figured as much. Oh well, for serious listening I'll just get that lightning to headphone jack cable and plug it into my Schiit stack (Modi / Magni Heresy AMP/Dac)
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoall the discussion about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27186288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27186288
- reph2097 5y agoLOL, when will people finally stop buying this stuff...
- periheli0n 5y agoI wonder whether someone who resents the lack of lossless audio in wireless, noise-cancelling headphones shouldn‘t rather consider buying an analogue, wired pair instead? There is signal loss in noise-cancelling, too!