These are the specifications your next Bluetooth headphones should have
Bluetooth headphones and earbuds will soon offer better battery life and improved audio quality due to the latest Low Energy Audio specification.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (BT SIG), responsible for the Bluetooth wireless standard, announced in mid-July that it had completed the full set of specifications for Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio.
Finalisation of the full LE Audio specification has reportedly been in the works since 2015.
Although initially promised for 2017, the BT SIG eventually revealed Bluetooth LE Audio in January 2020 and had planned to release it before the second half of 2020.
With the new standard released, you should examine the specifications of your next pair of Bluetooth headphones or earbuds carefully — especially the audio codec it uses to transmit sound.
As an audio file’s quality increases, it generally requires more bandwidth.
Like most wireless technologies, a Bluetooth connection’s bandwidth is limited. Even more so than other wireless connections.
When you try to transmit high-quality files that exceed the available bandwidth, it results in a stuttery, low-quality listening experience.
Efficient coder/decoders, or codecs, are therefore essential when it comes to Bluetooth audio.
An audio codec is an algorithm that encodes analogue audio into a digital format before compressing it and transmitting it over Bluetooth. Once the audio reaches the receiver, it is decompressed and decoded.
For you to listen to music via Bluetooth, the audio transmitter and receiver must support the same audio codecs.
Modern Bluetooth devices either use Bluetooth Classic or Bluetooth Low Energy.
The BT SIG said almost all products that debut with LE Audio would likely be backwards compatible with Bluetooth Classic.
LE Audio is available to any device with Bluetooth version 5.2, like the Galaxy S22.
Bluetooth Classic uses the Low Complexity Sub-band Coding (SBC) codec, while Bluetooth Low Energy has introduced the Low Complexity Communication Codec (LC3).
The BT SIG expects products supporting LE Audio to increase as the holiday season approaches.
“The lower power capabilities of LE Audio will also enable new types of audio peripherals — such as a wider range of Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids — and allow greater flexibility for better form factors,” the group said.
“Extensive listening tests have shown that LC3 will provide improvements in audio quality over the SBC codec included with Classic Audio, even at a 50% lower bit rate,” said Fraunhofer IIS audio communications head Manfred Lutsky.
“The SBC will typically encode a 1.5 Mbps audio stream to a 345 kbps stream, while the new LC3 codec can compress it to 160 kbps – less than 50% of the SBC data rate,” said Nordic Semiconductor, a Bluetooth SIG member.
Bitrate measures the speed at which data is transferred but is also used to describe audio files’ fidelity.
Audio with higher bitrates will sound better but will use more bandwidth to transmit.
The BT SIG’s audio quality comparison test results showed that LC3 provides a better perceived audio quality than SBC on all the same bitrates.
The bar graph above compares the perceived impairment of audio quality for the SBC and LC3 codecs across different bitrates.
Perceived impairment can be rated as very annoying (1.0) to imperceptible (5.0).
Therefore, the higher the number on the vertical axis, the better the perceived audio quality.
SBC’s bitrate ranges from 240 to 345 Kbps — therefore, it has no results for the 160 and 192 Kbps bitrates.
Besides better audio quality and reduced battery consumption, Bluetooth LE Audio also includes Auracast Broadcast.
Auracast will let an audio source transmit one or more audio streams to an unlimited number of receivers.
The Bluetooth audio broadcasting technology will let users connect to public TVs with their headphones and let them create “closed audio feeds” accessible only by a passcode.
Theatres will also be able to cast audio to individual viewers’ headphones. In combination with active noise cancelling, noisy theatre-goers will be a nuisance of the past.
Considering the benefits Bluetooth’s Low Energy standard promises, if you’re in the market for a new mobile device, it would be worth checking if it supports at least Bluetooth 5.2.
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