Want the best possible audio from your smartphone? You’re probably out of luck.

There’s a major move afoot within the audio industry to nudge people away from being satisfied with crappy sounding MP3s and other compressed music files. A couple of generations have never known how glorious true high-fidelity audio can be.

Music did sound better in the 70s and 80s. Back then, significant amounts of after-tax income was spent on audio gear that provided the clearest, cleanest, most and accurate sound reproduction at any volume. But when MP3s came along, their convenience and portability drowned out real hi-fi sound. Fortunately, that’s beginning to change.

Hardware companies are deeply invested in pushing better-than-CD quality digital files: FLAC, Dolby ATMOs, Hi-Res Audio, Sony 360, MQA, Apple Spatial Audio, and a few other “lossless” codecs. If you’ve experienced music in any of these formats, be it from a downloaded file or a high resolution stream, you’ll know that the effect is glorious.

Here’s the problem. You can’t experience music this way on your iPhone, any Samsung phone, or anything manufactured by Google. Why? Because none of those manufacturers have the hardware/software to properly support lossless audio.

Currently, the most popular encoder is called AptX, which is used by about 45 different phones. The platform used by the most popular phones (i.e. Apple, Samsung, Google) in the world are made by Qualcomm. They don’t make anything that will support AptX for listening on wireless earbuds/headphones.

And even if they did, Bluetooth lacks the necessary bandwidth to wireless transmit the signal. There is no way to listen to lossless audio via Bluetooth. Some smartphones allow for high-resolution listening, but you need a wired connection.

It’s so weird. Why does AptX exist when the most popular phones in the world don’t support it? And what will Apple, Samsung, and Google do about making sure we get the best possible sound? Apple has so much invested in Spatial Audio that you’d think they’d figure something out. How long are we going to have to wait before this gets sorted?

More details here.