This is where I have some bad news for Apple fans. one supports AAC but not aptX, and the other supports aptX but not AAC - they will fall back on good ol’ SBC. So if two devices support aptX, they’ll use that instead of SBC.īut if they can’t find any common ground - e.g. In general, they will default to the highest quality mutually supported codec. When two Bluetooth devices connect, they relay which codecs they support. If your earbuds support aptX, for instance, but your phone doesn’t, you won’t be able to use the aptX codec. For a codec to work, it needs to be supported on both the sending and receiving ends. How do Bluetooth codecs work? SonyĪs the word codec implies, if you encode information, you need to be able to decode it on the other end, and codec compatibility is key. So don’t worry - even if you don’t know the difference between these codecs, your chosen audio products will still work perfectly well together. If your head is now swimming, take a deep breath, because we’ve got good news: Unless you have a very specific need, like you’re a competitive gamer who needs ultra-fast response times, or you’re an audiophile in search of the best possible sound quality, you can probably stop reading.Įven though some wireless features can’t be fully appreciated unless you use one or more of the specific codecs listed above, the bottom line is that all Bluetooth devices support SBC. Samsung Scalable Codec (SSC)/Seamless Hi-Fi Codecĭo I need to care about Bluetooth codecs? Image used with permission by copyright holder.And as of 2022, the list of beyond-SBC Bluetooth codecs is astonishingly long: Some offer lower latency (the time it takes from when your device makes a sound to when your headphones let you hear that sound), some offer higher quality audio, some are built to be more energy efficient, and some try to do a little bit of everything. We now have at least 10 Bluetooth codecs that exceed SBC in some way. Mobile gaming still was many years from becoming mainstream.īut as these scenarios started to creep closer to center stage, it became apparent that we needed new codecs that could take us beyond SBC’s limitations. Today’s music streaming services hadn’t arrived, and almost nobody was talking about the need to support lossless music in 24-bit/96kHz. In the early 2000s, when stereo audio was added to Bluetooth, the highly-compressed MP3 file format still reigned supreme. SBC is reliable and always gets the job done, but it wasn’t built for high-quality or low-latency applications. And to this day, if your phone, computer, headphones, or earbuds only supports one codec, it’s SBC. When wireless stereo headphones first appeared, there was only one Bluetooth codec: SBC, or sub-band codec. Why is there more than one type of Bluetooth codec? Image used with permission by copyright holderĪs with all things technological, improvements get made over time as we get better at creating software and hardware. The word codec, by the way, is a portmanteau for encoding and decoding, which is geek-speak for packaging and unpackaging. Bluetooth codecs are the key to that repackaging and streaming process. If Bluetooth didn’t do that, when you hit play in Spotify it could take 10 seconds or longer before you heard anything on your wireless headphones. (Nor is it meant to be.)īecause some kinds of digital audio can be too massive to be streamed in real-time over that limited bandwidth, it needs to be re-packaged to fit. Each new version of Bluetooth (we’re up to version 5.3 as of 2022) adds a bit more bandwidth than its predecessor, but it’s still nowhere near as capacious as, say, Wi-Fi. What is a Bluetooth codec? Simon Cohen / Digital Trendsīluetooth, as a wireless technology, has traditionally been fairly limited in terms of bandwidth. But more importantly, you’ll know why it might (or might not) matter to you. What are they? And why should you spend any time thinking about them? We’ll break it down with a plain-language explainer so that the next time you read a headphone review that criticizes the lack of aptX, AAC, or LDAC support, you’ll know what the reviewer is talking about.
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