MacDirectory Magazine

Jordi Cerdà

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Audio — that’s a feature of the latest Bluetooth spec. While this means the AirPods Pro 2 will likely adopt Bluetooth 5.2, resulting in some nice battery life improvements, it’s entirely possible that Apple could also push a Bluetooth 5.2 spec update to its existing AirPods. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s done such a thing; the iPhone 6, iPad Air 2, and iPad mini 4 quietly got a Bluetooth 4.2 update in 2015. Apple also has a history of coloring a bit outside the lines when it comes to audio standards, as george points out on Twitter. However, no actual magic is required to support the LC3 audio codec, as that fits within the Bluetooth 5.0 spec, and there’s been no evidence yet that LE Audio is available in the new AirPods firmware. Is LC3 Lossless Audio? To be clear, this is not the Lossless Audio codec that many have been hoping for. Apple is reportedly still hard at work on that, but it’s almost certainly something Apple is cooking up on its own. The LC3 codec maxes out at 345kbps, which is a bit better than Apple’s 256kbps AAC codec, but it’s still far from even the 960kbps peak offered by the “near-lossless” LDAC, much less the 1,411kbps of true lossless codecs like FLAC and Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). LC3 is also a “scalable” codec, meaning the bitrate can vary depending on several conditions. LC3 can get as low as 160kbps when dealing with interference or range. That puts it well below AAC, which always operates at a steady 256kbps. In practical terms, this means it won’t necessarily be all that much better than AAC, which the AirPods already use for music. From what we’ve seen so far — and the testing I’ve done myself — the LC3 codec in the new beta AirPods firmware is not used for music. It’s strictly for the Handsfree Profile (HFP), which covers audio calls. Apple is unlikely to adopt LC3 for music for two reasons: Firstly, it doesn’t offer a meaningfully higher bitrate. However, more significantly, it would also require transcoding of audio content. Apple Music either plays natively in AAC or gets efficiently transcoded from Lossless to AAC using hardware encoding chips built into the iPhone and other Apple devices. Besides that, Apple is working on a proper lossless codec for music, so there’s no sense wasting time only marginally to bridge the gap with LC3. Codecs like Sony’s LDAC and Qualcomm’s aptX Adaptive already scale to much higher bitrates. While Apple isn’t about to get in bed with Sony or Qualcomm to license those, there’s already a scalable extension to AAC known as SLS (Scalable to Lossless) that can provide similarly near-lossless quality. However, since Apple could have easily adopted AAC-SLS already if it wanted to, the fact that it hasn’t means there’s a good chance it’s working on something even better: true lossless audio for its premium wireless headphones.

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