• 9point6@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    We really need someone other than Qualcomm & Apple to come up with lossless Bluetooth audio codecs.

    TBF the whole Bluetooth audio situation is a complete mess

    • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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      12 days ago

      Opus! It’s a merge of a codec designed for speech (from Skype!) with one designed for high quality audio by Xiph (same people who made OGG/Vorbis).

      Although it needs some more work on latency, it prefers to work on bigger frames but default than Bluetooth packets likes, but I’ve seen there’s work on standardizing a version that fits Bluetooth. Google even has it implemented now on Pixel devices.

      Fully free codec!

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          12 days ago

          That’s more than a codec question, that’s a Bluetooth audio profile question. Bluetooth LE Audio should support higher quality (including with Opus)

    • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com
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      12 days ago

      Wait, did Apple implement its own codec? I thought even the Airpods Max used AAC, which is lossy.

      As for Qualcomm, only aptX Lossless is lossless and I’m not aware of many products supporting it (most supports aptX HD at most)

    • conicalscientist@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Well bluetooth doesn’t carry enough bitrate to accomplish this. Besides. Apple won’t and doesn’t need to because their AAC encoder is superior. There is no other bluetooth codec that comes even close. Every codec that claims to be the best one yet is more marketing than anything.

      Vendors reframed the narrative for SBC to be dog shit so they can push their own as cutting edge new tech. In reality SBC isn’t that bad. The vendor codecs aren’t that good. And Apple has some kind of secret sauce in their AAC encoder that results in really good quality reproduction of audio.

      As far as I’ve seen most of the gimmicky codecs are spins of existing old technology. AAC itself is old too but at least one vendor Apple has focused on making their implementation good. We don’t need another standard+1. We just need a common standard done well. If only Apple would open theirs.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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        12 days ago

        BT 5 has max bandwidth of 2Mbps, which would in theory be enough for “CD quality”, i.e 44.1khz/16 bit raw uncompressed audio, as that’s around 1.4Mbps. In real life conditions it isn’t. AFAIK aptX lossless gets close by doing some compression.

        But if you go full audiophile levels and start demanding lossless 192khz 24 bit audio, that’s 10Mbps and not even remotely possible over BT no matter what you’d try.