> There are lossy compression standards like MP3, and Apple's own Advanced Audio Codec (AAC), which result in some data loss.
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?
It is an industry standard, in the sense that there are published standards for it and it was developed by an industry consortium, but in practice it never got traction outside Apple and they are essentially the only one who uses it. This happens sometimes: FireWire was an IEEE standard too but Apple and Sony were pretty much the only users. I don’t think it’s too misleading to refer to it as a de facto Apple-only technology.
What? AAC is one of the most common codecs used for streaming audio on the internet, Opus being the other common one. It's not exclusive to Apple at all.
>in practice it never got traction outside Apple and they are essentially the only one who uses it
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.
You are aware that 99% of the video mp4 containers you ever watched use AAC for the audio stream?
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.
AAC was indeed developed primarily by Fraunhofer IIS, which also developed MP3.
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.
Everything was patent encumbered to some extent, it was just a question of how you read the patents. I worked at AT&T Labs in the early days (they were also some of the inventors) and I remember being invited to Sony Music studios in Japan around 1999/2000, where the head of their studio business let us do a “dance off” between AAC and the proprietary Sony ATRAC3 codec at similar bitrates. Using AAC was a pretty obvious win vs. most of the alternatives out there around the time iTunes launched.
AAC-LC has been patent free for at least 6 years already if not longer. Unfortunately the best AAC-LC encoder is from Apple and it is not open source. But everyone can still freely use it though.
The lossless audio isn't the real benefit of this, it's the low latency. Current latency is ~100ms over bluetooth and is considered unacceptable for live playback of things (DJ'ing, music, etc). People used this on the Lightning version of the Airpods Max apparently, and it was missing until now on the USB-C version.
> The lossless audio isn't the real benefit of this, it's the low latency
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?)
It's hard to imagine a wireless technology that can improve on the experience of debugging a wire. You can always adjust the length of the wire or splice in a new one.
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.
Wired is absolutely superior but the fact is most people don’t care. There is an entire generation of people that grew up ripping audio from YouTube and could not care less about lossless or latency issues with wired headphones.
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
> 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
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.
>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)
"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?
I can't say I claim to have heard of ANC before, but the rest of these reasons to purchase apple headphones are true of the $20 chinese knockoffs I bought on amazon. And they come in a cute orange/salmon color rather than blanched.
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.
If you're happy with that then great! That's wonderful.
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.
I suggest not wiring with tissue paper if this is a serious issue for you.
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.
>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.
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.
How do you recommend vetting brands? This is simply not a problem wired technology ever had. I can't imagine ever trusting a brand to get things right without my fixing their mistakes.
> This is simply not a problem wired technology ever had.
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.
I've tried 100 euro wired IEMs that had that issue. The wire will inevitably hit something (your own clothing) as you move through the city or you will hear the wind vibrating the cable.
Idk if you just became accustomed to it or what but it was my biggest pet peeve with wired headphones
>for most people a water resistant phone is worth losing the 1/8” jack
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).
It’s another component that requires water resistant components. Obviously you can make it water resistant, but it comes at an additional cost. More importantly though, the 3.5mm jack is physically quite large inside the phone. It’s much larger than a USB-C jack, for instance. Easily 2-3x the size internally.
Yea but this only matters if you're considering fatness as a factor. This factor disappeared long before the headphone jack did. I have never in my life heard "i won't use that phone cuz it's too fat". Apple just irrationally hates wires. God forbid someone ask for a button!
>I don't understand why the industry forced a move to wireless before the technology was up to it.
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.
Ok, but don't they want my money? Why not cater to my money? The tech scam only works if people actually think the tech is better. What's so hard about offering a jack? Especially in any situation outside of phones. You could market it with "this will actually last" or "we ship headphones".
I just pray we are not stuck with current versions of bluetooth in perpetuity. What a nightmare.
All I want is Spatial Audio with head tracking that doesn't have audio drop outs, an issue that has been there from the start and never fixed. At this point I'll give up the wireless aspect for it.
> Accordingly, the company also says "the difference between AAC and lossless audio is virtually indistinguishable."
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.
> Then how come they are offering lossless audio on Apple Music, and even (actuall physically!) imperceptible "Hi-Res Lossless"?
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.
Yep. People will pay for it even if there’s only a perceived benefit. Everyone who has hung out with audiophiles has known at least one who is convinced they can hear the difference. But if that person was tested in a blinded format would they actually succeed?
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.
Meh. Some people might truly be able to hear the difference. A very small amount. I have some visual perception differences, even participated in a Stanford study on high fidelity visual perception.
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
I've been doing a bit of research on the limits of human vision today, as I was wondering if any ancient humans (say, at Newgrange) would ever have been able to discern the spiral of a galaxy with their naked eye...
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?
Can most people not see the sort of briefly appearing cloudiness/ cloudy streaks of light (idk how to describe it)/ galaxy arms in the sky, if you're in the middle of a forest/ with no light pollution??
I think people can see the milky way in the right conditions alright.. We know from ancient records that people could see it as well.
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.
I’m not contesting there is a difference between lossless and lossy audio in specific instances. It’s small but sure, I’m sure some people could tell. My contention is with the “Hi-Res” audio (which, for Apple, means 24-bit and 192 kHz sampling rate).
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.
Last I checked, Apple's iTunes store is still stuck on 256k AAC "iTunes Plus", first introduced in 2007. Sounds OK, but doesn't transcode well. I just want regular audio samples as a future proof format that doesn't require physical media.
Cymbals used to be the hallmark of terrible MP3 encoding artifacts, but they seem better on AAC.
Apple Music will not stream 24/96 to you if you are not using compatible equipment
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.
Calling it pseudoscience is a little simplistic IMHO.
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.
The statistics in the Pras & Guastavino paper seem a bit suspect. They do a lot of significance tests with no multiple comparisons compensation, and find few statistically significant results.
The problem is that with enough testing, you're very likely to get statistically significant results just by chance.
For my aging Apple devices, I have historically liked the airpod pros.
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
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadWhile 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.
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.
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
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_...
[2] https://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdf
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.
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