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A comment on Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Lossless Audio. Parent comment

Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by lxgr on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @12:19PM (#43473052)
> The lossless audio isn't the real benefit of this, it's the low latency

And we could have had that on all AirPods, for several years now, if Apple were to finally implement LC3 and Bluetooth LE Audio.

Other than enabling much lower latency for unicast, LE Audio even supports broadcast use cases (think gym TV audio, public announcements, hearing aid audio in cinemas etc) and much more.

I really don't understand why that's taking so long; this type of thing seems exactly like something Apple would usually excel at. (Maybe it's too open a standard, and they can't figure out a way to make gyms and cinemas pay for broadcasting to AirPods?)

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Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by Kirby64 on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @01:35PM (#43473823)
> And we could have had that on all AirPods, for several years now, if Apple were to finally implement LC3 and Bluetooth LE Audio.

LC3 still has 50ms or so latency from what I’ve seen. LC3+ is lower, but 20ms is still something. Wired you can be single digit ms easily.

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Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by jampekka on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:34PM (#43488758)
20 ms on top of other latencies (buffers) is not good for e.g. live monitoring.
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Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by pySSK on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:06PM (#43488507)
LE Audio is still too slow and low quality. The next step will likely be UWB audio.
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Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by conradev on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:11PM (#43488555)
Yes! I have a pair of "on-ear speakers" and they support the broadcast API: https://nwm.global/products/one

but I have not found a single place in the US that uses it

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Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by vosper on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:25PM (#43488682)
Interesting looking headphones - I'd be interested to read your review of them
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Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by dcrazy on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:32PM (#43488737)
Low latency audio for AirPods is already enabled when Game Mode is active: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ios-18s-new-game-mode-m...
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