CD-quality music is still the benchmark for decent sound; it’s not quite high resolution, but it’s definitely better than lossy compressed music found on Spotify and your old MP3 library. But listening to uncompressed CD-quality music on a phone can still be tricky if convenience is also important. The source material needs to be of high enough quality in the first place, and once it hits your phone, you need a way to route it to your headphones without that extra audio quality being compressed. Fairly easy in the age of wired earbuds, but a bit more difficult with wireless earbuds.
Qualcomm’s new AptX Lossless standard is supposed to finally close the gap between the fidelity of CD-quality audio and the imperfect compression of Bluetooth. Accessing it is even harder than it should be, but after spending an afternoon comparing it to its predecessor, the difference in quality is there.
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It’s taken a while for hardware that actually supports the new standard to appear since it was first announced over a year ago. In June, audio company Nura announced the first pair of headphones with AptX Lossless support, but only a few smartphones on the market are actually compatible with the new codec. That’s finally starting to change, though, with phones like the Asus Zenfone 9 shipping with built-in AptX Lossless support. Nura provided me with a sample of the phone so I could properly put their new headphones through their paces.
The NuraTrue Pro themselves are a fairly typical set of true wireless earbuds. They offer 8 hours of charging from the earbuds themselves, an additional 24 hours from the case, and come with four microphones on each earbud to handle calls and noise cancellation. These microphones are also responsible for Nura’s custom sound technology, which it claims measures your ears to optimize sound for them. Nura is currently funding the headphones through a Kickstarter campaign, which says the headphones are expected to launch in the fourth quarter of this year.
Importantly, Nura’s wireless headphones support Qualcomm’s AptX Lossless standard. The chipmaker claims that the new Bluetooth technology is capable of transmitting CD-quality audio (16-bit/44.1kHz), without any loss of detail (hence “Lossless”). This contrasts with its previous highest-resolution codec, AptX HD, which is still heavily compressed despite claims that it transmits audio that sounds on par with 24-bit/48kHz or even 24-bit/96kHz.
Despite its lossless brand, AptX Lossless is not entirely without compression. There’s still some compression at work here to bring the 1.4 Mbps CD-quality audio down to the 1 Mbps bitrate that AptX Lossless is capable of transmitting. But the difference here is that the compression used should not cause any data loss and is bit-for-bit accurate. “When unzipped it’s exactly the same as the original,” says Nura CEO Luke Campbell, “Think of a ZIP file. It gets smaller, but that’s exactly what it was when it was got out.
For my tests, I used Apple Music’s Lossless audio streaming. I checked that all audio quality settings were set to their highest available option and checked the specific audio resolutions listed for each track. In some cases, these tracks were actually higher resolution than the CD-quality audio that AptX Lossless is capable of transmitting, but that shouldn’t matter for the purposes of my comparative test.
In theory, the test should be relatively simple, but Qualcomm’s software doesn’t make it particularly easy to see when streaming through AptX Lossless. The new codec is technically an extension of AptX Adaptive, the company’s pre-existing codec that dynamically adapts the bitrate of your audio based on your environment. So when I connected the NuraTrue Pro headphones to the Asus Zenfone 9, a Qualcomm tooltip popped up noting that I was connected via “Snapdragon Sound” and “AptX Adaptive” without specifically mentioning lossless. But between Nura’s confirmation, me listening in a low-traffic location, and Qualcomm’s AptX site specifically mentioning that the device supports AptX Lossless, I’m confident I’m hearing lossless audio.
Neither Qualcomm’s nor Android’s software allows you to easily switch between different versions of AptX to perform an AB test. Instead, at Campbell’s suggestion, I took advantage of the NuraTrue Pro’s multipoint connectivity to directly compare listening through an AptX Lossless-enabled handset (the Asus Zenfone 9) with a standard AptX HD-enabled phone (the Honor 70). With this setup, I could have Apple Music streaming losslessly to both phones, then have the NuraTrue Pro connected to each in turn to see what difference, if any, in audio quality I could discern.
To my ears, AptX Lossless seemed to have a small but noticeable impact on audio quality. It wasn’t a difference between night and day (turns out Bluetooth audio compression has really gotten pretty damn good in recent years), but it was the kind of minor differences that are nice to spot in familiar tracks. A little more clarity here, a little more depth there.
As for Eagles’ “Hotel California” (which Apple Music said was streaming in 24-bit/192kHz high-res), the benefits of Lossless seemed most evident in the high frequencies. The plucked guitar notes in the song’s intro had more brightness and sparkle with the Bluetooth quality bumped up to lossless, and every instrument throughout the track felt more present and audible. It never rang wrong when listening on the Honor 70, but the Zenfone 9 had just that little extra detail.
That’s not to say the differences were stark, and clearly the quality of the track’s mastering has a big part to play. I tried listening to Nirvana’s “Lithium” (24bit/44.1kHz, a small improvement over CD quality) and it was much harder to tell the difference between the two audio codecs. Maybe Cobain’s guitar riff and opening vocals had a bit more space around them with AptX Lossless enabled, but I doubt I’d be able to tell the difference in a blind test . The differences were slightly more apparent in a busier trick like “Territorial Pissings”, which sounded muddier on the non-AptX Lossless device, but the difference was minor.
Then I tried some techno with “Elliptic” by Vessels (16bit/44.1kHz, aka CD quality). While the non-AptX Lossless handset felt a little overwhelmed by the track’s punchy bass, the Zenfone 9 gave it a much more balanced sound, with a higher pitch sounding much more prominent in the mix, and given more room to breathe. It was almost as if AptX Lossless helped unearth the song from a sea of bass.
Finally, I listened to “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs (24 bits / 44.1 kHz). Here, each of the instruments seemed more three-dimensional when streamed through AptX Lossless. They looked less like parts of a piece of music than physical instruments that had been recorded in the studio.
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In either case, I would struggle to call the enhancements offered by AptX Lossless transformative. But I felt like it added that little extra detail that I often didn’t realize I was missing. It’s almost like that moment when you start streaming a video, and it looks good until that moment when it properly buffers and comes into focus. It didn’t look “bad” before, but as soon as you see it in its highest quality, you become aware of the shortcomings.
There are always a lot of variables when testing audio hardware, and I wouldn’t want to draw any firm conclusions about AptX Lossless from my time with the NuraTrue Pro. The codec might have a more pronounced impact on high-end and/or over-ear headphones or with different songs, for example. But, based on my listening, the impact of AptX Lossless was subtle enough that I personally didn’t rush out to buy a new pair of headphones based on the audio codec alone (sorry Nura), and I absolutely wouldn’t buy a new phone for help. Even if I had a choice of two pairs of headphones, I would probably choose based on subjective audio quality rather than the model with the most advanced audio codec on its spec sheet.
Ideally, AptX Lossless would just become one of those audio features supported by enough smartphones and headphones for you to enjoy without realizing it. But while AptX is widely supported on many wireless headphones and Android phones, it’s been absent from iPhones and AirPods. Lossless Bluetooth streaming could be a great upgrade for any audiophiles who hate the idea of listening to lossy audio, but its subtle benefits might be a tougher sell for more traditional listeners.
Crowdfunding is a chaotic field by nature: companies looking for funding tend to make big promises. According to a study conducted by Kickstarter in 2015, approximately 1 in 10 “successful” products that reach their funding goals fail to deliver rewards. Among those who deliver, delays, missed deadlines or over-promised ideas mean that there is often in-store disappointment for the products that are made.
The best defense is to use your best judgment. Ask yourself: does the product seem legit? Does the company make outlandish claims? Is there a working prototype? Does the company mention existing plans to manufacture and ship finished products? Has it already completed a Kickstarter? And remember: you don’t necessarily buy a product when you support it on a crowdfunding site.
Photography by Jon Porter / The Verge
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