7 ms·

Apparently 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 ago
Meanwhile, my computer-with-regular-speakers-attached continues to support anything you could imagine.
- tantalor 5y ago
  Not that you'll be able to tell the difference
- reificator 5y ago
  Excellent. I'll bring your computer-with-regular-speakers-attached with me on my next bus ride.
  - everdrive 5y ago
    You joke, that's a laptop and headphones!
  - stinos 5y ago
    That 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 ago
    It'd be impossible to "enjoy" lossless audio on a bus ride in the audiophile sense.
- Orochikaku 5y ago
  Isn't it a little ridiculous to compare wireless headphones to wired speakers?
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Sure, 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 ago
      It’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 ago
        I'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 ago
        I’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
        No, it doesn't. The shape of the battery has absolutely nothing to do with how hard it is to swap. The amount of glue, restrictions on replacement parts and special screws does.
  - deleted 5y ago
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I 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 ago
Does 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 ago
  It's not infinite bandwidth.
  - Google234 5y ago
    It has plenty of bandwidth. MB/s
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kirby64 5y ago
      Source? 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 ago
        2 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 ago
        Coincidentally (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 ago
The 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 ago
    Well, 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 ago
If 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 ago
    That'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 ago
      What are the bandwidth and range for LE in practice?
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        2Mbits 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Is 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 ago
Why 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    It 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 ago
      No. 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 ago
No. 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 ago
  Who hurt you?

everdrive 5y ago

Meanwhile, my computer-with-regular-speakers-attached continues to support anything you could imagine.

tantalor 5y ago
Not that you'll be able to tell the difference
reificator 5y ago
Excellent. I'll bring your computer-with-regular-speakers-attached with me on my next bus ride.
- everdrive 5y ago
  You joke, that's a laptop and headphones!
- stinos 5y ago
  That 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 ago
  It'd be impossible to "enjoy" lossless audio on a bus ride in the audiophile sense.
Orochikaku 5y ago
Isn't it a little ridiculous to compare wireless headphones to wired speakers?
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Sure, 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 ago
    It’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 ago
      I'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 ago
        I’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
        No, it doesn't. The shape of the battery has absolutely nothing to do with how hard it is to swap. The amount of glue, restrictions on replacement parts and special screws does.
- deleted 5y ago
twobitshifter 5y ago
I 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 ago

Does 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 ago
It's not infinite bandwidth.
- Google234 5y ago
  It has plenty of bandwidth. MB/s
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kirby64 5y ago
    Source? 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 ago
      2 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 ago
        Coincidentally (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 ago

The 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 ago
  Well, 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 ago

If 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 ago
  That'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 ago
    What are the bandwidth and range for LE in practice?
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      2Mbits 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 ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Is 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 ago

Why 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 ago
I'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 ago
  It 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 ago
    No. 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 ago

No. 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 ago
Who hurt you?