aptX HD Bluetooth Support on iPhone 14 Pro is needed! My 3 year old Huawei sounds better.

I recently switched back from Android to OS and although I'm enjoying being back in the Apple ecosystem, as an audiophile there are some features that are seriously lacking, namely the quality of Bluetooth transmission to wireless earbuds on the iPhone 14 Pro.

My last phone was a Huawei P30, bought in 2019, which was impressively specced out and transmitted Bluetooth via aptX HD. Upon connecting the latest Sony WF-1000XM4 earbuds to the new iPhone I was completely disappointed in the audible and obvious loss in sound quality through AAC (or whatever Apple is currently using).

How can the latest "pro" iPhone still have such outdated lossy Bluetooth transmission? To test this further I connected my Cambridge Audio Melomania 1+ earbuds, which I'm very familiar with, and the results were the same. A serious loss in audio quality compared to what I was used to with the Huawei P30.

To confirm this I did a side-by-side comparison between the Huawei and the iPhone and this further confirmed what I thought. The iPhone 14 Pro sounded markedly worse. The soundstage was smeared, the sub-frequencies weren't as present, and there wasn't nearly as much clarity all over. Interestingly this was noticeable when streaming HD from Tidal as well as standard from Spotify.

I bought the iPhone with the natural assumption that it would sound the same, my confirmation-bias was in favour of Apple from the beginning, but the difference was so staggering that I had to double and triple check, and then do some reading.

Will we ever see aptX HD support for iPhones? Granted I'm a mastering engineer, but I truly think if the average consumer did a blind test even they would hear the difference in good headphones. This puts the "pro" into question for me and I'd think twice before buying a new iPhone.