Qualcomm’s New Lossless Bluetooth Chip Might Outperform Wired Connections

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Qualcomm has provide you with a brand new lossless Bluetooth chip that makes Bluetooth audio sound pretty much as good as music by a wire.

Bluetooth audio is ubiquitous, and ultra-convenient, but it surely has two downsides: audio high quality and latency. It’s unlikely that latency will ever be solved, however Qualcomm’s new aptX Lossless codec resolves the standard concern because it’s able to streaming audio at CD high quality and past. It’s even potential Apple was ready on this codec for its next-gen AirPods, that are at present incapable of streaming lossless Apple Music songs.

So, what are the challenges of compressing such prime quality right into a protocol that’s additionally used to attach keyboards and mice?

“All of it comes down to 2 points,” John Carter, sound engineer and inventor of Bose’s noise-canceling headphones, advised Lifewire by way of e-mail. “One, bandwidth for Bluetooth (it’s comparatively gradual), after which two, the time obligatory to show the aptX file into audio that may be routed as an audio waveform to audio system or headphones.”

Lossless?
When music is streamed, both over the web or by way of Bluetooth, the audio is transformed to a “lossy” format like MP3. Algorithms work out which elements of the audio will be thrown away with out affecting the standard an excessive amount of. Normally, listeners can’t inform the distinction between a great MP3 and the unique.

Lossless audio conversion additionally ends in smaller information, but it surely does so with out shedding any info. You possibly can convert again to the unique format, and the outcome must be equivalent. And whereas it’s smaller than the unique file, it’s quite a bit larger than lossy compression.

Now, Qualcomm has managed to create a codec (brief for encode/decode) that may convert and transmit lossless audio quick sufficient for basic use—in smartphones and Bluetooth headphones, for instance. With 5G networks coming on-line, streaming lossless audio from the cloud is sensible. Now, you may ship that audio to your ears with out wires.

The aptX Lossless codec runs at 16 bit 44.1kHz, aka CD high quality. It could actually stretch to 24-bit 96kHz lossy, too, which appears slightly pointless. It could actually additionally detect a lossless audio supply and auto-switch to CD-quality, in addition to downgrade the standard to maintain the music streaming.

“Bluetooth operates in a extremely variable RF-interference atmosphere populated with Wi-Fi and microwave ovens that may impression sign transmissions,” audio engineer Sam Brown advised Lifewire by way of e-mail. “The problem is in sustaining a excessive degree of audio high quality in all working environments.”

Delay
Everytime you press play on a tune despatched over Bluetooth, there’s a brief delay till the music hits your ears. It’s roughly tens of milliseconds, so that you by no means discover—till you play a recreation, or use a music app like GarageBand. In these circumstances, the sound will lag ever-so-slightly behind your keypresses, and it’s sufficient to be annoying.

This latency is attributable to changing the audio to a digital wi-fi stream, then changing it again into sound on the different finish. That is why players and musicians nonetheless use wired headphones and audio system—as a result of they’ve a latency of zero.

“The problem is in sustaining a excessive degree of audio high quality in all working environments.”

“What we’ll see is that Bluetooth administration of audio will get higher and higher over time, because it has previously,” says Carter. “The decoders that increase compressed information again into audio will get quicker and quicker. So, we should always anticipate to see continuous enchancment, albeit slower than all of us would love.”

However can it ever be pretty much as good as a wire?

“The high-performance gaming threshold is about 40ms, so these options are getting nearer and nearer to the goal of ‘zero-latency’,” explains Carter, however ultimately, it may not be a lot about engineering as priorities and advertising. Latency is a tricky promote. You by no means discover it when listening to music. When watching motion pictures, the video can also be delayed, so all of it syncs up.

AirPods
Apple Music’s current lossless choice doesn’t work over AirPods. We will guess that Apple will add some variant of aptX Lossless to any new AirPods, and the advertising message can be straightforward: better-sounding music.

However would Apple license this tech from Qualcomm? That half is hard as a result of the 2 corporations have been combating within the courts for years. One factor is for certain, although—Bluetooth audio is about to sound a lot better.

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