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Apple Explains Why Only USB-C AirPods Pro Support Lossless Audio With Vision Pro
(www.macrumors.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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TL;DR There is enough bandwidth in 2.4GHz, but fuck you consumer, buy more AirPods.
According to Wikipedia the theoretical max bandwidth on the 2.4GHz bandwidth is 706,25 kbit/s downstream.
I don’t have data from Apple, but Qualcomms lossless Bluetooth audio transmits up to 1Mb/s.
So, a three minute internet search supports rather apples story than yours.
You can have audio of arbitrary bitrate. Lossless just means it isn't being resampled or transcoded in a way that prevents exactly reconstructing the original signal. There's no reason why you couldn't support lossless audio up to 700Kbps, and the difference between 700kbps and 1mbps is well outside the range of perceptibility. You can also losslessly compress most audio that humans listen to by a significant degree, which is a completely transparent way to support higher bitrates if you can spare the processing time.
Lossless is understood to have a bitrate of at least 1411kbps, or about 1.4Mbps.
Theoretical sustained bandwidth capability of Bluetooth on the 2.4Ghz spectrum is 1Mbps, but in practice it’s a chunk lower in part due to overhead.
Even if we assume if you could just cram a higher bitrate through a smaller bandwidth (spoiler, you can’t), everyone would be up in arms about Apple lying about lossless and class action suits would ensue.
That said, you can’t. This is not like your internet connection where you’ll just be buffering for a minute.
As for what is and isn’t perceptible, I think you’re mixing up your tonal frequencies with your bitrates here.
No, lossless isn't assumed to have a bitrate of at least 1.4Mbps.
Yes, lossless compression exists.
No, I am not mixing up bitrate and frequency. Yes, with a typical codec the difference between 700kbps and 1mbps is almost certainly imperceptible in almost all conditions.