It's a 3.5mm deal-breaker.
I've tested the stock dongle with high end and generic $1 dongles, and most, even audiophiles cannot tell the difference. Surprisingly the iPad Air 3 seems to have the best sound coming out of the audio jack, far outpacing any of the dongles and predecessors.
Arguably there should just be a lightning-to-lightning connection option, but where there's a dongle, there's a way.
Ideally is corded mic and corded ethernet. Failing that, corded headset and wifi from a phone is runner up.
Like, I know this isn't trivial, but I could send a FLAC file between computers right now, and this is hardly a recent thing. Couldn't they conceivably use some HLS-esque thing on top of bluetooth to accomplish this?
Granted, I suspect the issue might be bandwidth being too low to make this realistic.
It still isn't proper Hi-Res and won't be enough for Apple's Hi-Res Lossless, but it's a lot better than standard BT audio.
[0]https://www.soundguys.com/ldac-ultimate-bluetooth-guide-2002...
heh, audiophool market is so incredibly stupid. Wooden knobs, extra special power cables, and now audio recordings for Bats. All you gain as a human are aliasing artifacts.
not difficult to encode, inaudible to humans
>entire spectrum
oh boy, so why does Hi-Res stop at 192KHz? clearly its not the entire spectrum. We should be encoding at least to couple MHz, right? more better!
Wooden knobs are fun. People like things that are fun. Chill out.
"Dynamics are better and overall naturalness is improved. Here is a test for all you Silver Rock owners. Try removing the bakelite knobs and listen. You will be shocked by this! The signature knobs will have an even greater effect…really amazing! The point here is the micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause degradation (Bad vibrations equal bad sound). With the signature knobs micro vibrations from the C37 concept of wood, bronze and the lacquer itself compensate for the volume pots and provide (Good Vibrations) our ear/brain combination like to hear…way better sound!!"
"Now to be fair, I couldn't find the actual website for the above as the link now provides an error message"
https://web.archive.org/web/20000511085018/http://www.askjee...
When someone is selling snakeoil, that's not fun. That's just shitty.
> Dynamics are better and overall naturalness is improved. Here is a test for all you Silver Rock owners. Try removing the bakelite knobs and listen. You will be shocked by this! The signature knobs will have an even greater effect…really amazing! The point here is the micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause degradation (Bad vibrations equal bad sound). With the signature knobs micro vibrations from the C37 concept of wood, bronze and the lacquer itself compensate for the volume pots and provide (Good Vibrations) our ear/brain combination like to hear…way better sound!!
Just about all of this is bollocks.
Here's where Boing Boing got the link, https://web.archive.org/web/20051124101630/http://www.ilikej...
And here's the original site: https://web.archive.org/web/20051214132650/http://www.refere...
I fully understand you are very upset about this 15 year old unsubstantiated post about expensive knobs, but it will relieve you to know that you could easily take 10 seconds and Google "wooden audiophile mods" and see hundreds of kits for stereos, headphones and DACs for $20-50 depending on what you're modding.
https://old.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/5lzar8/what_do_...
"wooden knobs are fun"
- "actually one time, 15 years ago, someone tried to sell wooden knobs for $500, therefore wooden knobs are not fun"
You must be great at parties.
It’s not like anything above 320 kbps mp3 will be detectable.
Switch it to a fireworks show and watch the quality suffer.
320kbps MP3 just means the codec allocates 320kb to store each second of compressed signal. Obviously some signals compress better than others and need much lower than that for an acceptable quality (audiobooks are often distributed at 64kbps).
And as I said, the airpods are medium quality earbuds. Not bad, not great. You will NOT hear any loss of audio quality if you play 320 kbps mp3 through them.
I'm sure most people could not hear any quality loss on 128 kbps mp3 (I don't these days), or even 64. But above 320 there is just no way.
The practical difference in the listening experience is, as you infer, negligible, to almost everyone. Classical music, or other such audio with large dynamic ranges, suffer the most. And while those frequencies above 12-16kHz are often the most obviously hit, the entire range suffers in other ways, phase, low end smearing, transient loss. And while first generation lossless to lossy conversion really is an excellent trade off, lossy to lossy very quickly produces audibly worse sound, even 320 to 320 conversion. But you knew that.
EDIT:
Added a "don't" to the first sentence.
It should be noted though, that gaming headsets have different priorities. They usually sport bulky design enabling bigger batteries, and low audio latency is a must, so whatever codec is in use it must work fast.
This seems like a bit of a non-story, though it does highlight the value there would have been in giving the AirPods Max a high quality wired audio option.