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Originally Posted by OtinG
I decided to get the Amazon Echo Buds 2nd gen as they are on sale for Prime Day at $80, marked down from the usual $120. They are not nearly as good as the AirPods Pro, but they are more in my price range. Unfortunately they don't have Spatial Audio, but I doubt I would be able to hear that well enough to take advantage of it anyway. I also think they don’t support Dolby Atmos as I can’t find any reference to Dolby in the specs. (At least I think that is what I read.) I'll give them a try and if they don’t work well enough for my hearing issues I'll return them and try something else later.
ETA: I corrected and clarified a bit of information on the Echo Buds 2nd gen.
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Spatial Audio should work with any wireless or wired headphones, as long as the Apple device supports Dolby Atmos (it turns out my iPhone XS and iPad Pro 2nd gen do not, so only newer Apple or Beats headsets or Dolby Atmos capable headsets/speakers) can consume SA when connected to them.
But I with my iPad mini 5 my cheap BT 6 year old headphones do get SA. And wired headsets of any sort also do (though the Music app crashes on iPhone 11 with my Rayz headset plugged in when it hits Lossless/SA track !?).
I’m still somewhat at a loss about Lossless. This is a good reference:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183
In particular, analog headsets can get 24-bit/48 kHz lossless audio. Hi-dev Lossless is supported only with external DAC for the 0.001% of the population who claim they can hear the difference.
The murky part for me is this:
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Can I listen to lossless audio using the AirPods Max Lightning to 3.5mm Audio Cable?
The Lightning to 3.5 mm Audio Cable was designed to allow AirPods Max to connect to analog sources for listening to movies and music. AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless recordings with exceptional audio quality. However, given the analog-to-digital conversion in the cable, the playback will not be completely lossless.
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It does not say what it means by ‘devices’. It cannot be a direct connection to iPhone which doesn’t have 3.5mm output (except via a Lightning to 3.5mm female adapter, which provides only 24-bit/48kHz). IPad 3.5mm out only supports Lossless (roughly CD quality), not hi-res lossless. I have that audio cable, and there’s no way it does analog-to-digital conversion (surely it just maps to the headset Lightning charging port analog pins — I would need super tiny leads for my meter to test this). And if the cable did convert to digital, then AirPods Pro can accept digital, in which case, you could presumably transmit digital directly and AirPod Pro would do the only DA conversion in the pipeline. Something doesn’t add up.
To my ears, even with Bluetooth compression, Lossless sounds better than the ‘High Quality’ 256kbps AAC (other services offer 320kpbs AAC). Lossless is just a better starting point prior to BT compression.