tech brief wireless high-res audio
First up: can we please all agree that there is no such thing as lossless high-res audio via Bluetooth. Bluetooth just isn’t fast enough to carry the required data rate.
Indeed we can simplify and say there is just no high-res Bluetooth full stop. For my money, high-res (by which I mean above CD quality) must be lossless to be genuinely high-res. Otherwise you’re throwing away parts of the signal. And the whole point of high-res audio is not to throw stuff away.
A codec like aptX HD is not remotely high-res. LDAC at its Bluetooth best is lossy high-res. aptX Lossless can achieve lossless CD quality if your signal strength is very good (but certainly not through the new low-power LE version of Bluetooth). None of them can do high-res Bluetooth, because it can’t be done under today’s Bluetooth standards.
Don’t get me wrong. All these codecs can sound great. Under demonstration circumstances they really can sound indistinguishable from CD quality and high-res. Sony’s Chief Sound Architect once told me that their own engineers can neither hear nor measure the difference between upscaled 256k and true high-res, noting this referred specifically to files upscaled through Sony’s DSEE upscaler, and that there were exceptions where music was particularly dense or complex. But for everything else, the implication was that high-res really is overkill. It revives that notion that the frequency part of high-res goes beyond the limits of hearing, so really what’s the point? (High-res bit-depth, however, undeniably provides more useful detail.)
Hi-Res Audio & Hi-Res Wireless
But wouldn’t it look great if companies could put a ‘Hi-Res’ logo on their wireless headphone packaging? This started happening around 2016 (it’s what set off my conversation with Sony), and you still see these logos on wireless headphones. But whenever
