Rarely has a technology been so ubiquitous yet so despised as Bluetooth. It delights many listeners by eliminating the need for audio cables. But audiophiles despise it because it reduces sound quality.
In the early days of Bluetooth, when signals often weren’t strong enough to carry stereo audio data reliably, the impact of the wireless format on sound quality was often obvious. It has radically improved since then, and new add-on technologies—referred to as “codecs”—have elevated Bluetooth to where it can be almost completely indistinguishable from CD-quality audio. But although these technologies