did you know that bluetooth audio has been mostly unchanged since 2003 i mean
this was three years before spotify launched and four years before we even
got the first ipod and while i'm sure you have a pair of bluetooth headphones
or a wireless speaker you absolutely love there are actually quite a few
shortcomings in the bluetooth spec most of us know and love but
huge changes are just around the corner as Android 13 is including support for
bluetooth le audio with the le standing
for low energy admittedly the name isn't particularly
exciting please clap low energy might make you think of a laptop CPU that's
advertised as being super power efficient but also frustratingly slow
but bluetooth le audio promises to be better in every way let's start out with
the biggest concern for most average users battery life although the
companies that make wireless headphones and speakers try and make a long battery
life a major selling point the fact is that they're all using the same outdated
and inefficient bluetooth classic protocol to receive audio signals it's
actually inefficient enough to have a significant impact on power consumption
both on your headphones and your phone but how does bluetooth le use less
energy at the heart of the new protocol is the lc3 codec and if you don't know
what a codec is it's just a piece of software that encodes or decodes audio
signals so they can be sent out in a compressed form to save on power and
bandwidth lc3 uses a new compression algorithm that allows for higher quality
audio at a lower bit rate meaning less data will be transmitted resulting in
lower power consumption without compromising on sound sounds too good to
be true and it almost is well this doesn't mean bluetooth le is suddenly
going to deliver audio that matches a lossless experience with wired
headphones it should be a noticeable improvement over the current codec sbc
although there already are higher quality codecs available for Android
like your crazy x they have their own issues aac famously used by apple
devices has quality and battery consumption problems on Android go
figure and ldac and optics from sony and qualcomm respectively are well
proprietary so if a headphone maker wants to support these they have to pay
extra for a license meaning not only are they harder to find they're also more
expensive for consumers by contrast lc3
is a required part of the bluetooth low energy spec moving forward so support
for it should be much broader and there are other really cool improvements other
than sound quality and battery life which we'll tell you about right after
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freshbooks.com techwiki even though having multiple speakers or headphones
play the same thing from one source is relatively easy to do with a wired setup
there hasn't really been a good not proprietary way to do this over
bluetooth so far that's changing with bluetooth le audio thanks to a feature
called auracast this should support use cases as simple as two people trying to
listen to the same song on separate headphones to hundreds of people
receiving announcements at an airport they might otherwise miss because
they're listening to spotify we might even see places like gyms and sports
bars adding auracast to allow people to listen to the tv of their choice which
might otherwise be muted as picking an auracast source on your phone should be
just as easy as selecting a wi-fi network and if you're watching this
video on a bluetooth speaker you might notice that the words you hear are a
little out of sync with my mouth bluetooth le should also help address
this because it has lower latency especially important if you like to use
bluetooth audio for gaming combine all this with better performance over
distance more accurate stereo sound thanks to each earbud getting its own
audio stream and even support for spatial or surround sound without
needing any special software and bluetooth le audio should at the very
least make wireless audio less of a pain
and it's supposed to be simpler than a tangle of wires how did this happen and
how did this video end so quickly oh well
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