BLUE TOOTH
Discover next-gen Auracast audio
Part of Bluetooth Low Energy, Auracast is ready to revolutionise the world of Bluetooth audio and Tam Hanna can finally give up his Palm OS device.
OUR EXPERT
Tam Hanna has been working with computers, software and electronics for more than 20 years.
Bluetooth audio is has been around since the days of the B Palm Tungsten T. Back then, compute power in mobile devices was a limited commodity. This meant the codecs used for audio transmission had to be optimised for the constraints of the semiconductor tech in use at the time.
LC3 leads to significant improvements in audio quality.
Better codecs please
Bluetooth 5.2 introduced a new standard called Low Complexity Communications Codec, or LC3. It uses advances in codec development to offer higher audio quality at reduced amounts of transmission volume. Tests by the Bluetooth SIG standardisation body revealed that a 160kb/s LC3 stream provides superior quality to a 345kb/s one based on the legacy encoding format.
Reducing transmission volume reduces the amount of energy consumed by the transceiver. It enables true stereo, where non-connected individual headphones can receive targeted streams containing only the output information intended for their direct use.
Interestingly, there were a few proprietary codecs before LC3 – https://bit.ly/lxf325codecs provides an overview. When paired with wired headphones, the interactive listening demo at https://bit.ly/lxf325demo permits evaluation of the sound quality achieved.