The HomePod will support Apple Music lossless audio

Little by little some of the many doubts left by Apple's announcement about Apple Music improvements are being cleared up. The company has confirmed that the HomePod and HomePod mini will be compatible with lossless audio. after a next update.

Apple announced major improvements to its streaming music service, including the ability to listen to the audio in a higher quality format, lossless for compression, in addition to adding the option of Dolby Atmos. While this last feature will be present in all the headphones and speakers of the brand, including some Beats models, the “lossless” music (without losses) left us much colder because at first I appreciated that no speaker or earphone was going to be able to reproduce it. But Apple has confirmed that both the HomePod and HomePod mini will receive an upcoming update that will make them compatible..

The situation with the AirPods and AirPods Pro remains the same, according to the company, andl Bluetooth does not allow lossless audio due to the limitations of the wireless connection itself, something that is not entirely true because there is the possibility of achieving a lossless "CD" quality through Bluetooth, which does not become High Resolution but improves the compression updates that the AAC codec supports.

If we talk about the AirPods Max we are in a similar situation regarding Bluetooth. The thing changes somewhat with the cable connection, but not too much due to the type of cable that we have for these headphones right now. If we want to connect them to our iPhone we would find three digital-analog conversions in three different points: one on the lightning to jack adapter for the iPhone; one more on the lightning jack cable for AirPods Max; the latter within the AirPods Max themselves. With so much conversion the loss of quality is evident, which is why Apple insists that it cannot be a real lossless audio.

This would be fixed, if Apple wanted to, with a Lightning to Lightning cable that allowed only one conversion to take place in the DAC of the AirPods Max themselves, but it is something that the company has not confirmed is on its mind, although we hope it is. The AirPods Max have more than enough capacity to listen to this type of sound, although it will never be High Resolution, since the DAC they include only reaches 48KHz.