Lossless USB audio is coming to the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and other Android phones

Tech enthusiast Mishaal Rahman posted on X about a comment made on Reddit by Google's vice president of engineering, Dave Burke. According to Burke, lossless USB audio is coming to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro and other Android handsets. With this feature, audio skips over the audio mixer and the typical processing pipeline thus ensuring that "bit-perfect audio" is heard by listeners.

Without using any compression and not altered in any way, the music is moving from your phone to your headphones in its original and uncompressed state. As you might imagine, this means that your favorite music will sound clearer as every instrument stands out. Vocals will sound better and all of the little things that get lost in a compressed mix are easier to hear. USB lossless audio will be coming to the Pixel 8 line in a future update.

The Pixel 8 series will add support for lossless USB audio in a future later release, according to Dave Burke in response to a comment from a Redditor.

Android 14 added support for lossless audio formats over USB wired headsets. pic.twitter.com/XYPyvIrzrc

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) October 12, 2023

Not all Pixel users care about audio fidelity and listening to USB lossless music requires that the user don a wired headset. That's because Bluetooth, with its wireless connectivity, is "lossy" which means that you'll have to move on from your wireless earbuds to take full advantage of this technology. Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Tidal are among the music streamers that already stream lossless audio.

Burke says that with support for lossless audio added to Android 14, the next step is for phone manufacturers and app developers to support the feature. While lossless audio has been around for a bit, there are some factors keeping it from being more in demand. First of all, even those who are music fans aren't interested in tearing down every song, noticing every tambourine hit in the background, or hearing every time the lead singer of their favorite band strained to hit a note.

Keep in mind that when listening to lossless audio on your phone, you will be using more data so if you have a cellular plan with some sort of limit (even some unlimited plans can reduce your data speeds under certain conditions if you consume more data than allowed during the month), you might want to keep an eye on your data consumption if you're listening to streaming audio using a lossless format. And you should note that downloading lossless audio takes up more storage on your phone than compressed audio.