Zane Lowe’s Vivid LIVE visit came with surround sound demos, karaoke chaos and a reminder that Apple Music is getting seriously good.
Spent the day with the legends at Apple thanks to Zane Lowe being in town for Vivid LIVE, and to be honest, the biggest takeaway wasn’t even Zane Lowe himself – it was karaoke.
Apple walked us through a bunch of new updates coming to Apple Music, and somehow the standout feature ended up being the fact your phone can now become a handheld mic for your TV.
Apple has basically turned karaoke into the coolest feature on your phone.
Through Apple Music Sing, you can lower the original vocals as much as you want, harmonise over tracks, or completely take over lead vocals while lyrics flash across the screen in real time.
It’s one of those features that sounds gimmicky until you actually try it. Then suddenly you’re picturing every house party, family gathering and chaotic 2am karaoke session it’s about to dominate.
But the real focus of the day was sound. Specifically, how Apple is trying to completely rethink the experience of listening to music through the new AirPods Max updates.
We sat in a room surrounded by nine speakers while producer and engineer Prophet broke down how Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos mixes are changing the way music feels physically – and the AirPods Max were very clearly positioned as the centrepiece of that experience.
To Apple’s credit, the headphones genuinely delivered.
The first thing you notice is how absurdly immersive everything feels. Active Noise Cancellation is now supposedly 1.5 times more powerful than the previous generation, and honestly, it tracks. The outside world disappears fast. Not in a claustrophobic way, but in that strange hyper-focused feeling where tiny details inside songs suddenly become impossible to ignore.
Old soul records, live festival recordings and huge layered pop productions suddenly sounded enormous. At one point it genuinely felt like Marvin Gaye and his full band were sitting somewhere inside the room with us. Tiny production choices – room echoes, backing harmonies, subtle percussion buried deep in the mix – started jumping out everywhere.
The lossless audio support through USB-C is also a pretty major step forward. Connected directly, the AirPods Max suddenly stop feeling like “premium lifestyle headphones” and start feeling much closer to proper studio listening gear. The low latency makes a difference too. Listening to live recordings and festival footage felt weirdly immediate, almost like the headphones were removing that tiny disconnect your brain normally accepts with wireless listening.
What surprised me most though was how balanced everything sounded. Apple could have easily leaned too hard into exaggerated bass or cinematic gimmicks to sell the immersive angle, but the tuning stays pretty controlled. Big mixes still feel huge, but vocals remain incredibly clean and forward. You can tell a lot of thought has gone into preserving detail rather than just overwhelming people with volume and effects.
Adaptive Audio also quietly ended up being one of the most useful features. The way it blends transparency and noise cancelling depending on your environment sounds like a minor software trick on paper, but in practice it makes the whole listening experience feel smoother and less isolating.
Apple is also leaning hard into creator tools this time around, adding studio-quality audio recording, Camera Remote functionality and Live Translation features that honestly feel a little bit revolutionary. Lyrics, phonetic pronunciation and live translations can all appear on-screen at once – which raises a very real question: are we all about to accidentally learn another language just by obsessing over our favourite lyrics?
It sounds slightly ridiculous until you see it working in real time. Suddenly you’re not just listening to international music (Bad Bunny and BTS, I’m looking at you), you’re understanding it, following pronunciation and singing along without constantly tabbing over to Genius lyric on your phone.
It feels like Apple has been quietly one step ahead of how people engage with music across cultures, and somehow presented us with something we didn’t even realise we needed – but now absolutely do.
The bigger pitch underneath all of this seems pretty simple: make listening feel exciting again. Between AutoMix acting like an AI DJ between songs, live lyric translations, concert discovery tools and Zane Lowe continuing to pull huge interviews on Apple Music Radio, the platform feels increasingly a lot less like a typical streaming app and more like a giant music ecosystem.
And yes, somehow, the karaoke feature still stole the show.
Stay up with all things Zane Lowe here, and check out the Airpods Max here.
