Despite rolling over and adding USB-C to its MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and select iPad models, Apple has resisted switching from its proprietary Lightning connection to USB-C on the iPhone. But it might not happen as soon as we’d all like. That’s the million-dollar question, and I think the answer is yes. Will Apple add USB-C to the next AirPods Max? Riley Young/Digital Trends And if Apple incorporated it into the next AirPods Max, it would give folks the best of both wired worlds: analog when people already own headphone amp/DACs that they love, and digital for when they’re content to let the headphones’ built-in circuitry do the heavy lifting. It’s already being used by the Master & Dynamic MW75 and the Bowers & Wilkins PX7 S2 in both digital and analog capacities, so this isn’t just theory - it works. And, yes, it can manage analog and digital audio. It can act as the interface for Thunderbolt 3/4 devices with up to 40Gbps of bandwidth. With the right hardware behind it, it can deliver up to 90 watts of power. If only there were a single, compact, fully reversible connector that can handle both analog and digital audio signals, the AirPods Max’s woes would finally be put to rest. And Apple is all about simplicity, not messiness. This explains why the Lightning-to-3.5mm audio cable does its analog-to-digital conversion - the signal going into the AirPods Max’s lighting port must be digital.Īpple could sell a Lightning-to-Lightning cable to deliver that digital signal, but it has never opted to do so, perhaps because you’d need a USB-A and USB-C adapter to use that cable with Apple’s other products and that starts to get messy. And if it can’t send analog signals, it follows that it can’t receive them either. We know this because if you want to use a set of analog headphones with any iPhone newer than the iPhone 7, you’ll need a Lightning-to-3.5mm headphone adapter. This illogical state of affairs raises the question of why does it exist in the first place? And what (if anything) can Apple do to fix it? I have some theories.įirst, let’s get some tech stuff out of the way.Īpple’s Lightning port can’t send analog signals. (And, yes, you read that right - you have to buy that cable separately.) It’s a process that Apple has acknowledged is less than ideal when it comes to listening to lossless music, saying, “given the analog-to-digital conversion in the cable, the playback will not be completely lossless.” USB-C to the rescue? VVVproduct/Shutterstock Its $35 Lightning-to-3.5mm audio cable takes an analog signal from your source device, then converts it into a digital signal, before finally converting it back into an analog signal. Instead of piping analog audio straight into the headphone’s drivers so that you can use an external headphone amp and digital-to-analog converter (DAC) of your choosing, and instead of using a direct digital connection so that you can feed the headphone’s internal amp/DAC with an unadulterated lossless digital signal, Apple has used a bizarre hybrid approach.
The AirPods Max have an optional wired connection, too, but it has to be the strangest wired connection in the headphone industry. Want lossless? You need a wired connection. The difference is that other headphone companies acknowledge this limitation by offering users a wired connection (sometimes analog, sometimes digital) that lets them get around lossy compression by going direct to the source. All Bluetooth headphones so far must use lossy compression - even if they’re equipped with a very high quality codec like Sony’s LDAC or Qualcomm’s aptX HD. This isn’t a situation unique to Apple’s headphones.
But it’s still a lossy codec, which means a fair amount of the information and detail contained in a CD-quality (or better) recording has to be discarded in order to make the audio stream small enough to be transported over Bluetooth. AAC sounds pretty good, all things considered. If you listen wirelessly, via Bluetooth, the headphones rely on the AAC codec. At issue is the fact that even though the Apple Music streaming service now offers most songs in lossless audio - in some cases at a hi-res audio level of 24-bit/192kHz - there’s no way to hear the full quality of these lossless tracks on the AirPods Max. The AirPods Max’s problem, in a nutshell, is the way they deal with audio connections. The great digital divide Riley Young/Digital Trends What’s that have to do with USB-C? Everything. What about lossless audio via wireless?.Will Apple add USB-C to the next AirPods Max?.