What is Apple missing to make its headphones and Bluetooth headphones evolve? Bandwidth! This is in essence the admission of Gary Geaves, during an interview with our colleagues from What Hi-Fi. The vice president of the acoustics division of Apple specifies:
“So we have to focus really hard to get the most out of Bluetooth technology, and there are a number of tricks we can employ to maximize or work around some of the limitations of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth. “
Remember that Bluetooth technology, initially designed for the headsets of mobile phones, is not able to offer a speed greater than 1 Mbit / s. And again, this value is only accessible under optimal binding conditions, which is rarely the case in real life. This is still sufficient to listen to audio with acceptable quality, for example using Apple’s AAC codec (up to 264 kbit / s).
On the other hand, the speed of Bluetooth constitutes a brake on listening in good conditions of the high definition audio, or of the audio in CD quality without compression.
The latter requires a bit rate of 1.4 Mbit / s (16 bits and 44 kHz). For the moment, only two manufacturers offer Bluetooth codecs that approach 1 Mbit / s: Sony with its LDAC (990 kbit / s) and Qualcomm with its aptX Adaptive (up to 1 Mbit / s).
Also to discover in video:
Apple cultivates the cult of secrecy, and Gary Geaves has not given any information on Apple’s future avenues to circumvent the limits of Bluetooth. The manufacturer could use Qualcomm’s technology, but Apple is more used to wanting to develop its own technologies, so that they meet its needs perfectly.
We can therefore imagine the arrival of a Bluetooth AAC HD codec or a Bluetooth version of the ALAC codec used for lossless sound streaming – the songs lossless now available on Apple Music. Or, the manufacturer could create a surprise by offering its own wireless transmission system for sound …
Source : What Hi-Fi