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chemicalbilly

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 18, 2016
2
1
The technical specifications for AirPods state that audio is transmitted via AAC. If my current iTunes collection consists largely of MP3 audio ripped from CDs, does this mean I will suffer some audio quality degradation as the iPhone will have to convert from MP3>AAC? I'm not an audiophile nut, but I would prefer to not have a lossy format converted to another lossy format. Will there also be a degradation in battery life as a result of this conversion process? I realize the answer may be unknown since we don't have AirPods in hand, but curious to hear other's thoughts on this.
 

matrix07

macrumors G3
Jun 24, 2010
8,226
4,895
The technical specifications for AirPods state that audio is transmitted via AAC. If my current iTunes collection consists largely of MP3 audio ripped from CDs, does this mean I will suffer some audio quality degradation as the iPhone will have to convert from MP3>AAC? I'm not an audiophile nut, but I would prefer to not have a lossy format converted to another lossy format. Will there also be a degradation in battery life as a result of this conversion process? I realize the answer may be unknown since we don't have AirPods in hand, but curious to hear other's thoughts on this.

I think your MP3 might be already converted when synced with iTunes.
 

Dandu

macrumors regular
Jan 23, 2009
120
15
The technical specifications for AirPods state that audio is transmitted via AAC. If my current iTunes collection consists largely of MP3 audio ripped from CDs, does this mean I will suffer some audio quality degradation as the iPhone will have to convert from MP3>AAC? I'm not an audiophile nut, but I would prefer to not have a lossy format converted to another lossy format. Will there also be a degradation in battery life as a result of this conversion process? I realize the answer may be unknown since we don't have AirPods in hand, but curious to hear other's thoughts on this.

Actually, every Bluetooth headphone works like that.

The standard is to use the SBC codec (very poor quality) and there is many optionnal codec. ATRAC (lol), MP3 (rare) and AAC (used by Apple). There is also many option to use a different codec, like aptX (good) and LDAC (by Sony).
 
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