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Bluetooth wireless lossless - any possible technical issues?

milokinni

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Mar 8, 2018
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Just last September, Qualcomm announced they have found a way to transmit lossless 16-bit / 44.1 kHz signals wirelessly via Bluetooth.

What are the possible technical issues that may confront a lay listener? I'm thinking of more jitter, higher distortions, etc. Or am I worrying too much, and it's simply a godsend?
 

Vincent Kars

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I'm afraid lossless Bluetooth don't exist.
If we talk lossless compression, using linear prediction, you can't guarantee that the result is lossless and the bandwidth lower than the original.
FLAC is a nice example. Compress a sonata for piano and violin and a bit rate of 600 kbs is perfectly possible. Compress som Punk (losts of noise) and 1100 kbs is a good value.

As CD quality is 2x16x44.1= 1411 kbs, it won't fit in the 900 kbs a codec like LDAC is using.
Of course LDAC is not FLAC, it is scalable so can run on 600 or even 300 if there is limited bandwidth.
But even if it is as good as FLAC and using its capabilities to compress a CD, it can not guarantee to be lossless within the 900 kbs limitation.
I expect the same from the Qualcom solution, it will be a scalable codec and of course marketed as lossless but I doubt this will be true because of the 1000 Kbs upper limit.
This is not a limit of Bluetooth (its EDR can do far better) but I'm afraid Bluetooth audio standard is simply tied to 1 channel hence this upper limit.

Bluetooth is developing a new codec, LC3. Its goal is to improve on SBC by becoming transparent at a lower bitrate, bit like AAC v.s. MP3. So no attempt at lossless at all!.
LC3+ aims at low latency and a bitrate of 500, again nothing lossless.

Oppo is a different case. Of course you can transfer massive amount of data over Bluetooth but it is not part of the BT audio standard.
What I expect is that you need both a sender and a headphone with this MariSilicon Y chip to get it to work. Makes me wonder if this will ever take off.
 
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