Hmm I can't remember actually, I'm pretty sure since it was intermittent they mostly just took my word for it. In my experience with Apple once they announce an official service program the genius bar is pretty lenient about providing free repairs/replacements.
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AirPods Pro vs. AirPods Pro 2 Buyer's Guide: Should You Upgrade?
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I have had mine since launch, and this is my primary reason for upgrading at this point.
The point is battery life and size of the device. If you switch to an ad-hoc Wifi network for lossless audio (Which you'll need for the bandwidth of lossless) you'll burn through a lot more battery on both the ear buds and phone than you would with Bluetooth. BT LE would've been a great update as that associated codec, while still lossy, is a definite improvement.
I mean trust me I probably have a hi-res FLAC/ALAC library as big or bigger than yours, I'm a professional mix engineer and love listening to that stuff in my studio, but lossless isn't going to do nearly as much for sound quality as say adding dual drivers and a Burr Brown-level-or-better DAC would.
Airpods are made for convenience, portability, and battery life first and foremost. Adding lossless would require getting rid of the selling points most people buy them for. Most people stream spotify or Apple Music in lossy codecs anyway (ogg, aac...).
If you want lossless you know how to get it, so why insufferably and condescendingly complain "you do realize.... you do realize..." about something that isn't trying to be audiophile?
You do realize you can still get wired tiny earbuds and an external DAC right? You do realize that the phrase "will also come" indicates a theoretical future product and thus can't be considered as an alternative purchase to Airpods right? You do realize you're part of the reason people hate on audiophiles right?
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Essential? The Airpods revenue on its own would be a Fortune 200 company. Seems like most people don't think it's essential.
Lossless wouldn't make much sense unless they also massively upgraded the driver (dual drivers would be great) and DAC, but then you're introducing problems by making an ad hoc wifi network for bandwidth.
If you really want lossless just plug in a USB dac and nice wired headphones. Personally where I listen to Airpods (subway, long walks) I don't really care about lossless. I have a great studio where I can listen to hi-res masters.
Inferior? ALAC can convert flawlessly to FLAC and back. They're both lossless, meaning no data is lost (duh), which is the important part right?
Battery life is a valid concern!
I apologize if my post came off a bit short. It is a bit tiring trying to argue against the same prevailing “they’re only tiny earbuds” comment so many times. The limitations and implications of this tech go far beyond tiny earbuds and that shouldn’t be an impediment to advancing the technology.
I believe one of the newer Bluetooth specifications allows for separate bitstreams to each speaker/earbud, so a theoretical implementation of that which halves the necessary bitrate by streaming individual L/R mono to each earbud might lower the bitrate enough to help make lossless possible within the confines of Bluetooth and not necessitate WiFi or some other wireless protocol. Thus, also negating the battery life concern.
At standard 16/44.1, the bitrate would be 706kbps at max and could only decrease further from there with lossless compression.
Battery life could actually improve with lossless depending on the implementation, FLAC is actually the least processor intensive to decode out of any format save for straight uncompressed PCM as WAV/AIFF. The AirPods might benefit taking a break from constantly decoding all that AAC.
I'm going to add that Bluetooth currently uses the AAC audio codec, so in fact if you're streaming from Apple Music in AAC you're not downgrading anything.
In terms of FLAC vs ALAC/AAC processing - Apple invented the codes they use, much like ProRes for video - and that standard absolutely SCREAMS on modern Apple silicon. I have no doubt they know how to optimize AAC and ALAC better than FLAC since they purpose built those codecs and can incorporate code into their SoC to optimize it even further
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FLAC and ALAC are identical from a sound quality perspective being that, as you know, they are both lossless and thus decode back to the same original PCM bitstream.
ALAC however has a few other key disadvantages as a container for that bitstream. For one, as a file format it is less widely supported by hardware/software outside of the Apple ecosystem, which is a concern for anyone maintaining their own library. Whereas FLAC is widely supported by pretty much everyone but Apple these days.
Second, ALAC is much less efficient as an encoder; worse compression = larger than necessary file sizes, which in itself means higher bitrates than would be necessary with FLAC.
Third, ALAC completely lacks any kind of checksum for the original audio data making it completely unsuitable as an archival format with no protections for data integrity. Whereas FLAC naturally stores an MD5 for every individual file.
As for AAC; anything played on the AirPods has to get decoded on the iOS device and re-encoded to AAC again on-the-fly for transmission even if it started out as AAC to begin with. Double-lossy transcoding is not great, so there is still some benefit to playing lossless audio on the iPhone to begin with even if that lossless bitstream is never going to make it to the AirPods.
Much less efficient? How is it less efficient? Proof please. Show where it's taxing modern processors because I find it really hard to believe that Apple would use a noticeably less efficient codec when all of their in-house video codecs are the most efficient on the market that work seemlessly with Apple-designed silicon. Same with the Airpods, they're designing hardware around their own codecs, which I'm going to guess would make up for any generic loss in efficiency. But please, prove me wrong.
Also I compared FLAC and ALAC versions of a WAV I just encoded and the ALAC is only .3 MB bigger - which might be because ALAC is an mpeg wrapper and can store album metadata, whereas FLAC can't. Either way, it's a negligible difference.
Please share a tech spec showing double-lossy encoding is actually happening. Would legit love to know why you would have to switch to PCM before encoding and beaming AAC again. I've worked with digital broadcast transmission gear for years using the AAC codec and once it's digital it doesn't go PCM until the DAC stage just before the amp.
Basic point - people who buy AirPods are in the iOS ecosystem and 99% of them will stream lossy audio. Your point seems to be Apple should re-engineer an incredibly successful consumer product for a niche market that doesn't want to use their codecs to begin with (even though lossless is lossless) at the expense of the reasons people buy bluetooth earbuds.
Airpods Pro for commuting, Focal Clear Professionals through a Lynx HiLo for at-home lossless listening.
Hahahaha, yeah it's a lot funnier when you actually read that as sarcasm, which my brain clearly did not at first... lol. Keep up the good work.
And I for one support placebo. I once performed at a show where a guest gave the audience "placebo hallucinogens" mints to prove the point that placebo can work even if we know its placebo -- and sure enough about 20% of the audience reported "seeing things" even though there was no psychoactive substance present.
Reminds me of so much snake oil in the audiophile world. Just go search YouTube for CD shaving or shop for $1k power cables to see what I mean.
FLAC can absolutely store album metadata, it has very robust tagging support and can even support storage of non-standard WAV metadata.
Which version of the FLAC encoder did you use to encode your test file and what CLI instructions did you use to encode with?
1.4.0 was released just a matter of days ago, and at a standard -8 is more efficient than the previous 1.3.4 release, which was already more efficient than ALAC. And compression efficiency can still be improved even further from the standard preset compression levels, at the expense of time. For example with the use of commands such as -e -p
It stands to reason that the difference from file to file very well could be more than .3MB, but regardless even if it were only .3MB, that still adds up. More data usage when streaming, or less files you can squeeze onto that shiny new 1TB 14 Pro.
For what it’s worth, I just tested an average modern pop song as an example, 16/44.1 that I ripped directly from a CD. The FLAC encoded with -8 -e -p, and the difference between that and ALAC was .7MB. But of course this is splitting hairs and will differ from file to file based on the audio content anyway.
As for AAC - All device audio happening on the playback device has to be mixed into the audio stream - for example, sounds from another app, or phone notification sfx, etc. and this can’t happen until the AAC stream is already decoded on-device.
I use the large tips. No problem with them sitting in the charging slot and charging, very infrequently I do have one not charge. I blame myself for being lazy and not paying attention when I dropped it in. Always the right ear too…
The fact that you're so in the weeds with different versions of FLAC encoding is the exact reason why 99.9999999999% of people don't give a **** about stuff like this. Again, would love to see proof/data showing real world impact of lossless codec efficiencies, not just taking your word for it.
Apple's ethos has always been "it just works," and I'm really happy streaming Apple Music hi-res lossless at home and lossy when commuting. The fact that AirPods (and the entire BT ear bud category) are such a success says most people agree.
What you really should be advocating for is the implementation of BT LE LC3 across the board. Not sure why (or if, they might actually be able to turn this on in a firmware update) they didn't roll with this already, but it would have a far greater impact on listening than reworking everything from the ground up just to have lossless on headphones that can barely take advantage of it (and for a guaranteed price increase).
Looks like the new Airpods Pro 2 are Bluetooth 5.3, whereas the originals are 5.0 This means they have the tech to support LC3 with the new iPhone 14 pro (the first BT5.3 phone they've made, 12 pro was 5.0)...
Big Agreed! as someone who has had multiple issues with the originals if the 2nd gen don't have the same problems then I will happily upgrade. I am happy that Apple acknowledged an issue and at least has a decent program in place for replacements though
Are they still going to fall out of my ears every 2 minutes? I switched to Beats Pro because they stayed in my ear. Unfortunately, they're inferior in every other way (sound quality, noise cancellation, frequency response, case quality, non-mag charging. I keep looking for something better. Bose make nice headphones but they're massive.
They replaced mine 4 times with no argument, they’ve gone above and beyond rectifying the situation
Very good to hear another similar experience, when I pick up my 14PM I am going to bring up my right airpod that has suffered yet again, I have just been waiting for iPhone day lol
Is anyone disappointed that there AirPods look exactly the same as previous gen?? It's gonna be hard to flex these unless you go around announcing to everyone that these are the "NEW" ones! I suppose you can make sure your lanyard loop is strategically showing..