- Apple said to have super-high quality wireless tech in iPhone 17 and AirPods Pro 3
- Lower latency than Bluetooth LE, higher quality than LDAC
- Designed for multi-device, multi-sensory applications
One of the frustrating things about being an Apple headphone owner is that unless you’re listening via wired second-gen AirPods Max, you can’t get full-quality Apple Lossless on Apple AirPods of any generation. But it looks like that’s about to change – and the tech is already inside the iPhone 17 and AirPods Pro 3.
Apple has apparently introduced support for SPR AVS in the latest iPhones and AirPods Pro, and while some of the details are still under wraps this could be the future of high-quality AirPods audio.
Why Apple’s audio acronym could deliver serious sound
SPR AVS is the far-from-catchy acronym for Spatial Relay Audio-Visual Sync, and as Patently Apple reports it’s designed to replace or work alongside Bluetooth and AirPlay via Apple’s N1 wireless chip and its A19 processor.
Its job is to deliver very low-latency, high-bandwidth communication between Apple devices. The latency is even lower than that of Bluetooth LE Audio and Snapdragon Sound, low enough for real-time tasks including gaming and Live Translation, and the quality is high enough to deliver “true lossless” audio streaming to AirPods Pro 3 and future Apple headphones and earbuds.
It’s not entirely clear exactly what Patently Apple means by “true lossless”, but I would assume it means that the ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files of Apple Music, and any high-quality streaming or game audio, can be transmitted without any re-encoding or compression. Just the source audio, sent to your ears, basically.
Crucially for Apple, it also syncs across multiple devices – so you could have your iPhone, Vision Pro and AirPods Pro 3 running together for perfect playback. And because it’s peer-to-peer – it connects device to device without needing to go through a Wi-Fi router – it’s straightforward and helps protect user privacy.
So why can’t you use it in Apple Music? The main reason appears to be that Apple is focusing on spatial computing – Vision Pro and its successors – and what Patently Apple describes as “multi-sensory experiences that require tight connection between devices.”
This makes sense based on the fact that AirPods Pro 2 actually are also able to do lossless audio… but only when used with Vision Pro. Apple clearly sees a need for it here, that it doesn’t elsewhere – and who know knows, maybe the new tech is a battery killer.
That means the lossless streaming is hopefully a feature that might trickle down from Vision Pro eventually, rather than something Apple’s going to prioritize for AirPods right now. We live in hope…
