When it comes to Bluetooth for wireless headphones, many people will probably think of the Bluetooth version, ‘the higher, the better.’ But besides that, there is also another extremely important factor that is CODEC. In short, CODEC is a music compression and decoding standard at both the source (smartphone, tablet) and the receiver (headphone, wireless speaker). The more ‘genuine’ the CODEC, the better the quality of the music will be kept; besides, it does not cause a delay between the headset and the source.
So in this article, We would like to send you a small comparison between CODECs so that everyone has one more knowledge in evaluating and choosing to buy wireless headphones!
SBC
SBC is the Bluetooth Special Interest Group; all Bluetooth-enabled products have a basic standard, so it’s not optimized for sound quality. This standard only supports a bitrate of about 328 kbps, enough for Lossly music (mp3, for example), but higher standards are not.
AAC
AAC is also not a new standard, having been around since 1997! AAC has a fairly low bitrate, only 250kbps, commonly used in devices such as iPod, iPad, Youtube, or Sony’s PlayStation lines.
apt-X and apt-X HD
apt-X and apt-X HD are probably the ‘hot’ names in the wireless headset industry today as a stamp to show the quality of the products sold. These are all standards of the famous chip manufacturer Qualcomm, so smartphones with this processor are equipped, so iPhone does not support!
apt-X can transmit 16-bit/44.1kHz CD-quality music, but during transmission, it will compress music to 352kbps to ensure stability without interruption. The more advanced apt-X HD standard, which can transmit 24-bit/192kHz music, is higher than CD, which is a high-end music standard used by many people when downloading music online.
In actual use, apt-X and apt-X, when combined with Bluetooth 5.0, give quite high stability between the headset and the source. We don’t have times when the music is interrupted in the middle, there is no delay (too high), and this is probably more important than the quality of the sound, how good the music is but ‘when it’s good, the strings break’ doesn’t solve the problem either!
LDAC
That is a very high-end standard developed by Sony, applied to many pairs of wireless headsets and DAP, its smartphones. LDAC is said to outperform even apt-X HD, can transmit bitrate flexibly at 330kbps, 660kbps, and 990kbps, with 3x better music compression performance than SBC and apt-X. The huge disadvantage of this CODEC standard is that it is a proprietary technology of Sony (a company that often creates copyright standards). So only its products and a few other brands are used without, not as popular as apt-X and apt-X HD.
To simplify matters, people can see the bitrate comparison table of current CODECs. The newer the CODECs, the more optimized the MUSIC quality will be, and the SOUND QUALITY issue will still have to be handled by the earphone’s diaphragm. In the present time, if possible, everyone should choose apt-X standard headphones, which is the most reasonable because finding LDAC standard headphones is very difficult and may not have the right sound quality.
popular audio codec most which is best packs what the pack video product quicktime after effects quality premiere pro to use why h 264 currently