I think I’m talking about the speakers and codecs themselves. I always try them in the Apple Store with high hopes but the audio is blatantly compressed: it sounds “tinny” while lows and mids come out poorly reproduced.

I know that with Bluetooth there is limited bandwidth, so even with high quality source files it’s always going to be (re-)encoded with AAC. Apple ditched aptX which is a shame, because at least the quality was much higher than AAC.

I use an AudioQuest DragonFly while listening to music, and it’s clunky for sure but I don’t want to be forced to use Bluetooth and compression.