An Apple engineer talked about the lack of lossless audio support for Apple's AirPods Pro 2 wireless headphones in a new interview.
The current Bluetooth technology in the AirPods series means that Apple's audio products do not support Apple Music lossless audio. Apple has previously hinted that it might develop its own codec and connection standard on top of AirPlay and support higher-quality audio streaming, but so far there have been no such moves.
Apple Music offers 24-bit, lossless streaming up to 48KHz, and high-resolution lossless streaming up to 192KHz, which requires an external digital-to-analog converter.
In an interview with What Hi-Fi, Esge Andersen, an engineer on Apple's acoustics team, said that Apple doesn't think current Bluetooth technology is the limiting factor for AirPod's audio quality. Esge Andersen added that even with current Bluetooth technology and codec standards, Apple can still make improvements in audio quality, while the company's focus remains on reliability.
Esge Andersen says that while audio quality will always be a priority, it's important to understand that we can still make huge strides without changing the codec. And with the codecs we choose today, it's more About reliability. So there are various environmental factors involved. We want to push sound quality forward, and we can do that with a lot of other elements. We don't think codecs are currently the limit for audio quality on Bluetooth products.
In the interview, Esge Andersen also provided an interesting perspective on how Apple developed the new AirPods Pro 2 and validated the sound quality. Esge Andersen revealed that Apple has a team of sound experts who provide feedback on audio quality to Apple engineers. In the end, there will be some compromises, because everything can't be perfect.
One of the most notable improvements in the new AirPods Pro 2 is better active noise cancellation. Apple says the new AirPods Pro's ANC is better than before. Esge Andersen said Apple was pushed to make this major improvement because it wanted to "put AirPods Max in everyone's pocket.
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