Since Apple Music offers us the possibility of listening to its entire catalog in Lossless quality, either in 48 KHz or in 192 KHz, we have raised a subject: And how to listen to this quality on the AirPods? Well, at the moment the only way to enjoy the best sound quality that the platform offers us, it’s via wired headphonesand not all models for that matter.
The bandwidth of the Bluetooth signal that the AirPods use to receive audio from our iPhone or iPad is singled out as one of the culprits for this limitation, but it seems that Apple has another opinion on the matter. Here’s what Apple’s acoustic team engineer Esge Andersen tells us.
Quality improvements even with existing codecs
First, let’s briefly understand the topic of digital music quality. Music is an analog wave with billions of values and a gentle slope between two contiguous points, while its digital representation is a kind of scale that rises and falls like the wave, but in finite amounts. So there is two variables when it comes to ensuring maximum similarity between digital and analog waveformsthe width of the wave in the horizontal direction in terms of how many values I could throw (the bits) and how many times per second we measure that position of the wave (the KHz).
What can be understood by horizontal resolution and vertical resolution gives, subsequently, a quantity of information. The higher the resolution of the wave, and therefore the higher the quality of the resistant sound, more information we need to transmit from device to headset. And this is where the Bluetooth issue comes in.
Analog wave and digital wave.
However, speaking in an interview with What Hi-Fi? Anderson explains that Apple doesn’t believe current Bluetooth technology is a limiting factor in AirPods audio quality. He claims that even with current Bluetooth technology and codecs, Apple can improve audio quality. He comments, however, that currently the focus is on connection reliability.
“It’s important to understand that we can still make great strides without changing codecs. And the choice of codec we have today is more about reliability. It’s about doing something robust in all environments.”
“We want to push the sound quality, and we can do that with many other things. We don’t think the codec is currently the limitation of audio quality in Bluetooth products.”
In this sense, it is worth remembering the approach that HomePod mini has brought us. A loudspeaker that due to his size and physicality he should sound much worse than he does, but which, thanks to an artificial intelligence engine, equalizes the music to make the most of this material. A resource that has since expanded to more of the company’s products and could mean improvements to AirPods.
In fact, that’s how the AirPods Pro 2 have been developed, according to Andersen, ever since Apple formed a panel of “sound experts” giving audio quality feedback to engineers. As Andersen himself acknowledges, “ultimately there is a trade-off, because you still can’t make it perfect for everyone”.
From this interview, we can expect that Apple can surprise us at any time in terms of sound quality. You may even be able to do this through a firmware update of the devices we already have with us. News that is undoubtedly welcome and shows us that in the field of wireless digital sound we have not yet heard the last word (pun intended).
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