Apple Music has been offering lossless audio for nearly four years, but its own premium headphones have been locked out of the experience and limited to lossy audio. Solid hardware, but so-so audio. That’s often the price for wireless audio equipment.
The upcoming iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 updates will add support for lossless audio on the AirPods Max, but there’s a catch. You’ll have to plug these wireless headphones into your device with a USB-C cable.
Although Gen Z has brought wired earbuds back into style, so maybe you won’t care? Anyway, top-notch audio has always had its price.
lossless audiO? What’s that?
Lossless audio uses more data bandwidth in exchange for not chopping out any of the audio data being streamed to your listening devices. Lossy audio uses less data by trimming out bits of each song’s data that are less noticeable to the ear. Less noticeable doesn’t mean unnoticeable, though.
If you have excellent headphones or speakers and want to take advantage of them fully, you’re going to want lossless audio. Using them with typically lossy audio formats is like drinking through a straw with a hole in it.
There’s no word that Apple’s AirPods lineup will get support for lossless. For now, at least, it’s just the AirPods Max that will be able to play up to 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio. Apple also says “ultra-low latency” audio will be riding shotgun into AirPods Max along with the lossless audio update, but there are no details beyond that phrase repeated several times on Apple’s announcement.
Apple Music, Tidal, and Deezer offer hi-fidelity, lossless tiers, and Spotify is rumored to be finally launching theirs this year. If it were me with a pair of AirPods Max sitting around and I were already shelling out for a lossless streaming subscription, I’d tether those babies with a USB-C cable so fast I’d look like an anime character.
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