You Need Wired Headphones To Listen To Lossless Audio On Apple Music

Last night, Apple had announced that the Lossless Audio option will be rolled out to Apple Music alongside Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos next month. These new features will be provided at no extra cost to subscribers but if you are already looking forward to listening to your favourite song with the new hi-fidelity setting through the service, then you also may have to invest in new headphones.

This is because you need a wired headphone in order to do that. In the age where wireless headphones and true wireless earbuds including Apple’s own AirPods series have become so popular among consumers, this limitation may seem rather irritating.

However, the reason behind this limitation is fairly rudimentary. CD-quality audio has a bitrate of 1411kbps and while Bluetooth has a transmission ceiling rate of around 2000kbps, the actual transmission speed that users are able to get in real life is far lower due to interferences as well as distance between devices.

There are indeed some hi-res audio codecs out there that have been optimised for Bluetooth transmissions such as Qualcomm aptX HD and Sony LDAC but even then, their bitrate is still nowhere close to CD-quality audio. As a comparison, aptX HD goes up to 576kbps while LDAC maxed out at 990kbps.

On another hand, Apple has yet to come out with such codecs itself. Furthermore, Apple Music’s Lossless Audio files will be encoded in Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) which is not supported even by the company’s highest-end wireless headphones, the AirPods Max.

Even though AirPods Max can be used as a wired headphone, it will still not be able to support Apple Music’s new Lossless Audio option. In terms of codecs, the headphone, as well as AirPods Pro, are limited to AAC, in addition to SBC which comes as a standard on any Bluetooth audio device.

Of course, we have also mentioned last night that users who want to push the playback quality even further via the Hi-Res Lossless Audio option need to use external devices such as a USB digital-to-analogue converter in order to make that happen.

As for the Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos, it turns out you can listen to Atmos tracks with any given headphones. Just choose the Always On option in the Apple Music’s Settings and you will be good to go.

EA Delists Five Older Need For Speed Titles; Servers Shutting Down In September

Electronic Arts is pulling five older Need for Speed titles from digital storefronts. And it’s doing so very abruptly too. If you love some of these titles but never got around to getting them, it may already be too late.

The quiet announcement came via a Reddit post. In it, an EA community manager says that the publisher will be pulling Need for Speed Carbon, Undercover, Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed and The Run. The online servers of these games will also be closed in three months. And this is done so that the publisher can focus on working on the new games in the series, the upcoming one already being delayed. But doing so means moving resources from maintaining the older ones.

As mentioned, the announcement came very abruptly. At the time of writing, the Reddit post is stated as being up 10 hours ago. But the announcement itself says the delisting of these older Need for Speed games will happen starting 31 May 2021. Even with time zone differences, this would mean that at best there’s a couple of hours left before they are gone.

If you already own these games though, you’ll still be able to play them normally. Online functionality will remain until 1 September, when EA shuts down their servers. Beyond that, offline is the only way you’ll be able to play these Need for Speed games.

Apple Patent Describes Showing 3D Images On Flat Screens Without Need For Glasses

Getting 3D images to work on consumer devices, especially without the need for specialised glasses, is not easy. But an Apple patent describes a method that the company is considering using to make it happen. But while it answers that half of the equation, it raises more on the other.

The Apple patent describes getting a flat screen, presumably that of an iPhone or iPad, to show 3D images for VR and AR content. But this doesn’t involve having two screens for the way VR and AR headsets work. Instead, it will alternate rows of pixels in a screen, so that one set of pixel rows show one image, and the other shows the second.

But as mentioned earlier, the patent only describes the way the screen will simulate the overlapping of two images for the 3D effect. What the patent doesn’t mention is the user side of things. Like the way this will help users create the 3D depth without the help of glasses or goggles. Nor does it say if there’s any supporting tech, like gaze detection that we see on the Nintendo 3DS.

As is always the case with patents, having one filed doesn’t mean Apple will actually make something with this tech. And considering the challenges behind it, it probably won’t be anytime soon until we see it, if ever.

Xiaomi Believes Future Phones Don’t Need Ports; Unveils One with Quad-Curved Waterfall Display

After revealing the Mi Air Charge Technology, Xiaomi has decided to showcase yet another conceptual product in the form of the quad-curved waterfall display concept smartphone. This particular concept device is pretty much an attempt by Xiaomi’s engineers to design a phone that is almost fully covered by the glass screen.

Xiaomi stated that among the challenging aspect of this project is to craft the hyper-curved glass panel which has an angle of 88-degrees and requires a long list of complex procedures to make it a reality. The company also claimed that it finally managed to come out with the final product after thousands of attempts.

Since all sides of the concept phone are covered by glass, the functions that were traditionally performed by physical buttons have been taken over by touch gestures. One such example shown in the video released by Xiaomi is how users just need to slide their fingers on the side of the concept phone to adjust its volume.

What made the concept phone even more interesting is the fact that it has no port as well which the company believes is a new direction for future phones. Xiaomi claimed that it has plenty of solutions that can make this happen including piezoelectric ceramics, flexible display acoustic technology, under-display camera, wireless charging, pressure-sensitive touch sensors, eSIM, and many more.

In fact, the new concept device was made possible through the usage of the company’s 46 patented technologies that were developed in-house. While Xiaomi has a habit of releasing its concept phone into the market, this particular model is likely not ready for the public as the company not only didn’t provide any details regarding its specs and availability but there is no product name for it as well.