The extremely-popular Bose QuietComfort 35 II headphones offer market-leading noise cancelling and sound quality, but unfortunately, a lack of support for any hi-res Bluetooth codecs like LDAC will leave users shackled with a headphone cable if they want to experience high-quality audio.

Also known as the Bose QC35 II, the flagship headphones only support bog-standard SBC audio and compressed AAC audio over Bluetooth. This is fine for iPhone users, as Apple Music uses AAC natively and the iPhones don’t support anything higher anyway, but if you ever switch to Android, you’ll be missing out on the high-quality LDAC and AptX HD codecs built into all recent Android phones.

This is a long-standing complaint from uses of these headphones, and they’ve been on the market a while, so there’s little hope of AptX, AptX HD or LDAC support being added via a firmware update. If you’re looking for a pair of noise-cancelling over-ear headphones with hi-res wireless audio, you’ll have to switch to another brand.

Hardcore fans of Bose will have to keep waiting in the hope the company adds LDAC or AptX HD support to a future set of headphones. The Bose QC 35 II 2 were released over two years ago in September 2017, so the next iteration might not be too far away – though some competitors are still releasing flagship models without the codecs in late 2019.

If you think you’d love the Bose QuietComfort 35 II but have been put off purchasing by the absence of LDAC or AptX HD support, make sure you let Bose know. Send them an email or tweet so they know there’s big customer demand for wireless hi-res audio, as it really is the best way to make the most of those fantastic headphones and they’re somewhat crippled (at least as wireless headphones!) without it.