Apple’s recently announced lossless audio feature on Apple Music was followed by a cold shower: Apple’s audio gadgets, including the AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, HomePod and HomePod mini do not support lossless audio.
Now, in a new document on its website, Apple has revealed more details about lossless (a form of audio data compression that produces a perfect reconstruction of the original audio data), and tucked away in the FAQ is an interesting bit of news: HomePod and HomePod mini will eventually get support for the new feature.
“HomePod and HomePod mini currently use AAC to ensure excellent audio quality. Support for lossless is coming in a future software update,” says Apple. There’s no word on when said update might be coming.
As for the company’s headphones – AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and Beats wireless headphones – the news is not so good. All of them “use Apple’s AAC Bluetooth Codec to ensure excellent audio quality,” and “Bluetooth connections don’t support lossless audio,” Apple says.
Apple’s big, over-the-ear headphones, the AirPods Max, can be connected to an analog music source via Apple’s Lightning to 3.5 mm Audio Cable. However, this still doesn’t mean you’ll be able to listen to lossless audio on them.
“AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless recordings with exceptional audio quality. However, given the analog to digital conversion in the cable, the playback will not be completely lossless,” Apple says.
However – and this is interesting – Apple’s Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter does have a “digital-to-analog converter that supports up to 24-bit/48 kHz lossless audio,” Apple says. It’s unclear whether this can be used to listen to lossless audio on AirPods Max; theoretically it should, but we’re sure Apple would’ve mentioned that if it were the case. Some digging through MacRumors forums indicates that the AirPods Max don’t work with said cable, or third party Lightning-to-3.5mm cables, so the answer is probably no.
Lossless audio, which is coming in June, will offer a big chunk of the Apple Music catalog in higher sound quality than you currently get. However, it requires using Apple’s ALAC codec, which isn’t supported on Bluetooth, which has in turn caused most of the incompatibilities listed above.