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 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a major selling point, the fact is that they're all using the same outdated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.
But 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 Aptix 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.
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'd 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, like it if you liked it. Dislike it if you dislike it.
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