LE Audio and the Future of Hearing

Sounds like another ploy to get people to buy into new devices

Both. They said that 5.3 would address some issues in 5.2. Nick Hunn said there were already dies out there.

Hearstream is kind of the brand for broadcast audio. So go to the cinema and look for the Hearstream logo. They spent a lot of time on how Classic and LE would work together. They were bullish on LE but didn’t predict the doom of Classic.

When asked what Apple would do Hunn says if I knew that I’d sell the information and buy a small Caribbean island.

@cvkemp said:

Sounds like another ploy to get people to buy into new devices

(It’s a consortium of electronics manufacturers) Whatever gave you that idea?

Chuck, d_Wooluf agrees entirely with you - his answer is tongue-in-cheek!

Since the Zoom webinar was posted as a YouTube video, we have access to an auto-generated text transcript (according to your language preference for YouTube, I think). The auto-generated transcript can be accessed by clicking on the “…” menu at the lower right underneath the video window. Pick “open transcript.” Once open, using the web page search function of your browser (Ctrl+F in Windows 10), you can search for text words within the transcript. With timestamps turned on in the transcript, you can go to that time in the video to view the actual presentation by clicking on any phrase of interest (each phrase serves as a hyperlink to that section of the YouTube video) or just read the text. The transcript has the following information on when BT 5.3 will be available in phones. The conclusion is perhaps next Christmas (2022-a year and a half from now). Here’s the part of the transcript relevant to that. The speaker says music sharing amongst the young, e.g., at a beach party, is what’s going to drive adoption and auto makers (those lackards!) are what’s going to keep classic BT around for 10, perhaps 15 years after BT LE Audio makes its full debut.

Edit_Update: I removed timestamps from quoted portion of transcript to improve readability. With transcript open in YouTube view, the 3 vertical dot menu to the right of the Transcript titlebar menu offers the option to toggle timestamps on or off. I also commented above on an important feature of the text transcript: each phrase serves as a hyperlink to take you to the relevant section of the YouTube video when you click on a phrase in the transcript. Try it!

(starts at 72:55 timestamp)

so that’s one thing that i think will

drive them the other one

is that concept that you can share music

from your phone so if a group of friends

come round or your kids go out for a

beach party they all take a speaker with

them

they all connect up and it works and

i think for the phone vendors that’s one

of the most interesting

immediate applications because it’s

selling to that young

demographic who will regularly spend

money upgrading phones

for that reason i think we’re going to

see this sooner than we might otherwise

have expected

um i don’t think it will be in this

year’s phones

i think as luca says they’re going to

wait for the 5.3

chips but they’re already sampling those

so those will already really be

being prepared for the phone launches

next year

um i wouldn’t be surprised to see

any audio appearing in some of next

year’s phones

um we may even see them

in some of the spring announcements i

think that would be early

but i’d be very surprised if you can’t

ask

for one in your christmas stocking next

christmas

and you have an idea of when when we

won’t see classic anymore um

long time um i i mean the reason for

that

is one of the things that will keep

classic

in phones is um one it actually is quite

expensive to design it out of the chip

if you look at what happens with i mean

it’s not just bluetooth chips it’s the

the basic modem chips if you buy a 5g

phone it’s still got 2g in it

because people just add stuff in

taking it out can be quite awkward

um but the real one is as i said it’s

cars

people keep cars for 10 years or so

the automotive industry is also slow to

move to new technology so

you’ll be able to buy a phone with low

energy audio probably two to three years

before you can buy a car with it

but phones won’t take classic out

until those cars are getting towards the

end of their life

so i do think if you’ve got a phone

you’ll have classic in it for at least

the next 10 and probably the next 15

years

and you won’t know which is being used

some of the time if your earbuds and

hearing aids

have both there’s going to be

conversations going on between the phone

and your hearing aid or earbuds as to

which to use and they may use one for

some applications and another one for

different ones

(ends at 75:36 timestamp)

Good use of available tech! Thanks. Interesting projections. My understanding of when major manufacturers release flagship phones is that Apple will like do so this Fall. I really doubt that they’d have BT 5.3 by then. Samsung in late January or February. Seems like Samsung might release a phone with BT 5.3 AND a SOC using the new ARM 9 architecture. (More excuses to raise prices )

LE Audio is for talking too (bye Roger?)

Another Benefit of LE Audio for People with Hearing Loss | Bluetooth®...17

Hard to tell what the Starkey guy is talking about but I’m guessing (perhaps wrongly!) that he’s referring to using the multi-channel feature of BT LE Audio, i.e., at least several microphones directed at (or on) speakers around a table, an aggregator that listens to the various channels and merges them into one channel rebroadcast to an HA-aided listener(s) (and maybe earbud-aided listeners, too). What would be neat is if there were a mechanism through the direction that you were looking or through a smartphone or watch app to pick out the channel of a particular speaker. Perhaps with Apple’s bidirectional HA MFi interface (or earbud interface?), each speaker, wearing HA’s or earbuds with microphone could inherently have their own unique channel to broadcast on in a group get-together. Even normal hearing people might like the feature in earbud devices if one could better hear the person down at the other end of the table or across the room in a big meeting. I’m just trying to wildly extrapolate from what the Starkey guy was rather vaguely alluding to when he said, “That (?huh!) could be REALLY BIG!” - trying to imagine something really big!

I was thinking along the same lines as you but I was also thinking about something that Nick Hunn said- that many use cases probably haven’t even been thought of yet. I haven’t properly participated in a dinner table conversation in decades so it sounded very alluring (big!) to me! Even 1-1 is something my wife might appreciate.

I think some use of the direction your head is turned would be a technical possibility.

It would really come together if people with good hearing got onboard with their earbuds. That way, you wouldn’t have to find a whole group of hearing impaired friends to have dinner with

Yes, but if you click on the image, you’ll get the version I linked to. Not sure which one is the correct one.

@Spindel said:

f you click on the image, you’ll get the version

That’s what’s been happening for a long time now. The image has changed slightly lately but you still got an all blue image when you clicked on it. I think the first one you come to is the right one.

Yes, I think you are right on this one. It looks like they have published “drafts” for the gray ones, e.g.:

https://www.bluetooth.org/DocMan/handlers/DownloadDoc.ashx?doc_id=5229968

This is interesting
https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-aptx-lossless-audio/10

CD music quality audio with less cutting out