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Bluetooth is getting a significant feature update with the new LE Audio standard announced by the Bluetooth SIG at CES this week. Bluetooth LE Audio is intended to fix a number of issues that make the feature less capable and flexible than information technology ought to be while simultaneously improving sound quality.

First upwards: improved audio quality. Up until now, Bluetooth has used the SBC codec, described as "designed to obtain a reasonably good sound quality at medium scrap rates while keeping low computational complication." Translation: It's not very good. The new LC3 codec essentially improves audio quality while keeping bitrate low. If I had to guess, I'd guess that the codec is now a scrap more compute-intensive than the last — we saw H.265 brand a similar trade vis-à-vis H.264. At 160Kbps, every listener preferred the newer codec, merely LC3 allowable a majority even at 345Kbps encoding.

Bluetooth_Codec_Comparison

Bluetooth LE Sound will natively back up multi-stream audio. Right now, when your telephone sends a Bluetooth signal to a pair of earbuds, the signal only gets sent to one earbud, which is and then responsible for relaying the indicate to the other earbud. If you've ever noticed that i of your earbuds tends to drain before the other, this would exist the reason why — ane earbud is working equally a transmitter and receiver, while the other is only receiving. With multi-stream audio support, that problem is gone. This may help with sound latency; LE Audio won't need to utilise software tricks to make the audio in your ears synchronize properly.

Some other added benefit of multi-stream support is that multiple people will be able to tune into the aforementioned broadcast y'all are. This characteristic is chosen Broadcast Audio and allows sound streams to exist shared with multiple people. A Bluetooth SIG representative told The Verge that hearing aid owners who attend a movie theater would be able to synchronize their hearing aids with the film.

BT-Feature

"Location-based Audio Sharing holds the potential to change the way nosotros experience the world around u.s.a.," said Peter Liu of Bose Corporation and fellow member of the Bluetooth SIG Board of Directors. "For example, people volition be able to select the audio being broadcast by silent TVs in public venues, and places like theaters and lecture halls will exist able to share audio to assist visitors with hearing loss as well as provide audio in multiple languages."

Formal support for hearing aids is existence added to the LE Audio standard and the Bluetooth SIG sees this every bit an opportunity to integrate Bluetooth back up into more products similar televisions. Some of these features are places where Qualcomm and Apple have introduced their own innovations (Qualcomm with its AptX codec, Apple with the W1 processor that creates a better pairing experience), only the SIG is making them formal components of the standard.

The downside to this flurry of activity is that it'll likely mean new devices to be purchased, and support won't come soon. The LE Audio standard is going to scroll out beyond the first half of 2020, which ways we probably won't run across supporting devices until the holidays this year (best-instance) or, more probable, early 2021.

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