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LE Audio and the Future of Hearing

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yes, there may be a password to prevent people from accessing it but it will never be secure as a peer to peer. because you can never trust people to not share the password…

@MDB said:

if a manufacturer claimed a certain BT

If they advertise as Bluetooth compatible I believe they need to be certified. Perhaps the chipset they use has the certification. Wi-Fi has similar certification requirements for the use of their trademark.

Pixel 7 uses Google’s Tensor 2 chipset. The Pixel 6 (and variants) used the Tensor 1 chipset and it is certified 5.2

@MDB said:

obscurity is intentional

I would guess Marketing names are obscure or confusing many times. They were likely aiming to be technically accurate before Marketing naming was known.

While is going to be great when it is finally universally available, I learned along time ago to live for the present and let the future take care if itself.

Given the endless wait, I sometimes wonder whether there’s trouble in paradise- some issue that’s being mulled over by the manufacturers of which we’re unaware. Maybe they’re thinking that just because they can do something that doesn’t mean that they should.

Weird fact: Samsung have enabled between their phones and their buds, but only from the mics in the buds to the phone. They’ve enabled a niche use but seem to ignore the main game. You can record audio via LE Audio, but you can’t play it.

There are a couple of possible issues with broadcast audio on mobile phones that I can think of.
The first is copyright. Are they really going to let us flick a switch and share whatever’s playing on our phones with everyone around us? The music industry is not going to take kindly to that. The second is intentional misuse. So you’re doing your commute in the train. Someone is advertising a Bluetooth stream called Bill’s Tunes. You tune in to it and it’s hate speech, or promotion for some nutjob religion.

So, are there non-technical issues holding up LE Audio? It just seems weird to me that this far along since it was announced in January 2020, you still can’t stream from a phone to earbuds via LE Audio.

Maybe there is just the chicken and the egg problem. If devices could use either classic or BT at the user’s choice, it might be easier to introduce BT LE Audio. The same would go for and ’s. If they could either operate by an “old” protocol or use BT LE Audio interchangeably, it might be easier to introduce BT LE Audio. I am presuming if my Omnias got upgraded to BT LE Audio, I’d no longer to able to use my PC+, my Multi Mic, and my TV Streamer 2, for example, and would have to buy all new accessories.

Perhaps it’s impractical to have BT devices that straddle the old and the new worlds at the same time. But what venues are going to upgrade to BT LE Audio if there aren’t a ton of people running around with BT LE Audio earbuds or headphones, etc. I don’t think HA use is enough to get the ball rolling. And we’re just coming out of a big economic dislocation (the pandemic) with inflation to be followed by a predicted recession up ahead.

If Apple made BT LE Audio a thing, that might help. But it probably likes being where it is right now with AirPods being so popular and doesn’t want to rock the boat. Perhaps it just takes a long time to get all your ducks in order to bring new devices to market, too. The 2022 and early 2023 devices were already well along in design and production while the BT LE Audio standard was still being finalized in mid-2022. Perhaps it’s going to take at least well into 2023 and even 2024 before there’s any momentum ever developed.

Everything I’ve read on deployment tells me that, for some years, consumer devices will mostly be “dual”- LE Audio and Classic Audio. I don’t know how many protocols can coexist in hearing aids’ more limited silicon real estate but I agree that multiple protocols in any particular model of aids would help things along.

Yes, Apple are very comfortable where they are. Bluetooth SIG are promoting the hell out of LE Audio, but everyone else is maintaining radio silence. Some sort of public commitment and roadmap would be nice. If you ignore the consumer side of things for a moment, this is major assistive technology. If Google and the rest are nice people, they could maybe push things along? This might also be their big chance to stick it to Apple, so why aren’t they?

As a layman, I am clueless as to the complexities of developing and bringing this thing to market. Maybe things are proceding as quickly as we could hope for. I do wonder, however, if something is going on.

From my reading of a Hi-Fi online article from around August (which I cannot find again) the author commented that LE audio has not devoted much bandwidth to the hearable (ie music) portion of the signal. His comment was that combined the two channels would provide significantly less music quality than BT classic.

He further commented that the current audio codecs used in earphones and buds are likely to remain superior for quite a while. This suggests that although BT LE audio will be great for phone calls, it may not be an improvement for quality audio streams.

I am totally NOT an expert or even particularly well informed so my observation could be way off. Others more knowledgable will be more accurate.

Regards

In reply to @Euang

There’s a graph on this page that compares subjective assessment of - the default codec for - to SBC- the default codec for Bluetooth Classic Audio. It seems pretty good.
Whether it’s good enough probably depends on if you’re an audiophile with good ears listening to music on great equipment in a quiet environment.

A Technical Overview of LC3 | Bluetooth® Technology Website1

Over the past two decades, since its inception, Bluetooth® technology has become the go-to solution for the vast majority of wireless audio streaming applications. If you’ve ever listened to music…

If it’s not good enough, there will be other codecs available for LE Audio if the manufacturer of your equipment chooses to license them. LC3 Plus will be one of them. It has been certified for hi res audio by the Japanese Audio Society (for what that’s worth).

https://audioxpress.com/news/lc3plus-certified-for-hi-res-audio-wireless-by-the-japanese-audio-society1

Edited

The kicker might not be vs. SBC but LC3 vs. classic AAC:

Conclusions & Observations:

  • AAC offered very high fidelity at 144 kbps. Most scores were better than 4.0 (Perceptible, but not annoying).
  • LC3 encoder, provided by ESTI, did not offered fidelity comparable to the commonly used AAC codec at 144k.
  • The two AAC encoders were tied at 144 kbps CBR. It’s not clear whether qaac was the better or the FDK-AAC was the better.

Source (from my Oct. '22 post link above): Personal blind sound quality comparison of the Bluetooth codecs (AAC vs LC3)

The testers claim their survey was done blind (double-blind is better!) and they compared AAC to LC3 Plus.

As noted in the comments to their blog, they didn’t compare the codecs at higher bitrates at which LC3 Plus, etc., might have fared even better compared to AAC.

The testers previously found SBC inferior to LC3 Plus, if I read the comments correctly.

AAC is going to be better than SBC for certain. I didn’t have the stamina to go through it and critique his methodology (for starters, who’s this “ESTI” that provided the encoder). A safe assumption I think is that audiophiles won’t like LC3, cause everyone will have it. LC3 is a good codec that balances quality of sound, latency and battery drain. That’s my working assumption. Other codecs will be developed or adapted for that will keep the audiophiles happy.

He may have meant etsi, not esti. www.etsi.org1. Unsure.

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