Yeah, the problem (imo) isn’t lossy v lossless. It’s that the supported codecs are part of the Bluetooth standard and they were developed in like the 90s.
There are far better codecs out there and we can’t use them without incompatible extensions on Bluetooth.
There’s a push for Opus now, it’s the perfect codec for Bluetooth because it’s a singular codec that fits the whole spectrum from low bandwidth speech to high quality audio, and it’s fully free
You literally can not distinguish 192 Kbps Opus from true lossless. Not even with movie theater grade speakers. You only benefit from lossless if you’re editing / applying multiple effects, etc, which you will not do at the receiving end of a Bluetooth connection.
The newer H2 SoC AirPods support ALAC, Apple’s lossless codec; however, their phones don’t yet support it, so the only way to use it is with the Vision Pro.
AFAIK, ALAC will not be actually lossless over bluetooth for the sames reason LDAC can’t be lossless; there simply isn’t enough bandwidth. That doesn’t mean that it won’t sound great or perhaps work better than LDAC.
Wait, did Apple implement its own codec? I thought even the Airpods Max used AAC, which is lossy.
As for Qualcomm, only aptX Lossless is lossless and I’m not aware of many products supporting it (most supports aptX HD at most)
Yeah, the problem (imo) isn’t lossy v lossless. It’s that the supported codecs are part of the Bluetooth standard and they were developed in like the 90s.
There are far better codecs out there and we can’t use them without incompatible extensions on Bluetooth.
There’s a push for Opus now, it’s the perfect codec for Bluetooth because it’s a singular codec that fits the whole spectrum from low bandwidth speech to high quality audio, and it’s fully free
Opus is great, but there is no option to make it lossless, like what WavPack (also a free-as-in-freedom codec) provides for example.
Transparency is good enough, it’s intended to be a good fit for streaming, not masters for editing
Why not have the option for true lossless available so that Bluetooth can be scaled up to sound good on even the highest end of systems.
You literally can not distinguish 192 Kbps Opus from true lossless. Not even with movie theater grade speakers. You only benefit from lossless if you’re editing / applying multiple effects, etc, which you will not do at the receiving end of a Bluetooth connection.
The newer H2 SoC AirPods support ALAC, Apple’s lossless codec; however, their phones don’t yet support it, so the only way to use it is with the Vision Pro.
AFAIK, ALAC will not be actually lossless over bluetooth for the sames reason LDAC can’t be lossless; there simply isn’t enough bandwidth. That doesn’t mean that it won’t sound great or perhaps work better than LDAC.
It runs over a 5GHz connection, not a 2.4GHz connection like bluetooth.
Oh, so they aren’t on bluetooth at all? That is an entirely different story, thanks for the info.
Wait what? Do they not connect over bluetooth? Please don’t tell me they made up more proprietary bullshit.
Yes, the protocol used is currently proprietary. That being said, so was ALAC at launch and they later made it open-sourced and royalty free.