An iPod Classic reimagined, rebooted and ready for anything And Apple can make that happen with a reboot of the iPod Classic line. There could and should be a better solution. But dropping £1249 ($1500) whenever you want a new phone to accommodate your massive music storage needs is neither something most people can do nor does it make a lot of sense, even if you can afford it. The problem is that storing a huge collection of lossless or high-res audio requires a ton of storage, and getting a ton of storage on a mobile device is expensive in the modern-day, especially if you prefer using Apple’s suite of mobile devices.įor me, I’m blessed to be able to afford to upgrade my iPhone every few years and get the storage I need. After all, I’m completely capable of securing whatever music I like at whatever quality I demand and transferring those files over to my phone. So, once again, local playback sounds like the way forward. It’s endlessly frustrating to be transported back to the mid-2000s when doing anything involving the internet on your phone was an agonizingly slow, cumbersome process.

And don't talk to me about offline playback, which remains a clunky solution. Regularly, music will take time to buffer after hitting play, and streams in particular may start-and-stop mid-playback.

Which again means no lossless listening.īut even with the audio quality that I do receive when streaming, I have issues. But actually they only work with analogue audio sources in wired listening mode. In the case of the AirPods and AirPods Pro, that's not exactly surprising, seeing as they're both completely wireless and Apple only supports the AAC (rather than ALAC) codec over Bluetooth but the AirPods Max can be wired to an iPhone, so one might hope that that could be a way to get lossless audio. but that doesn't work with AirPods or even the AirPods Max, for example. Complicated, right?Īnd, by the way, this is the same with Apple Music, which now offers lossless audio. Next, you need a decent DAC such as the Audioquest DragonFly Cobalt or Chord Mojo. First, you’ll need to invest in Apple’s Lightning-to-USB camera adapter which forms a link between your iPhone and the DAC. Apple’s Lightning-to-3.5mm is limited to supporting 24-bit/48kHz. You need a DAC to do the decoding and hear the highest quality MQA files. For starters, playing hi-res audio on an iPhone isn't so simple. Well, it turns out there are a lot of problems.

Why get ipod touch instead of iphone