![]() There won't be much, if any, audible difference between aptX at 384 and SBC at 345. The biggest improvement over SBC is that it requires a bit rate of 384 Kbps. The initial version of aptX is still around, and fairly common. The trick is, both products - the phone and the headphones, for example - must have aptX to get any benefit. "aptX audio is a bit rate efficient technology that ensures you receive high quality audio from your Bluetooth device, so you have a better listening experience." Qualcomm, the company that currently owns the aptX patents, makes big claims about its technology. The oversimplified version is that ADPCM uses fewer bits per sample, so the files are smaller. Where MP3 uses psychoacoustic modeling to take out data, aptX uses "time domain ADPCM," which is a whole rabbit hole of fun research for any of the technically inclined readers out there. This isn't to say that any two codecs at the same bit rate will sound the same, but it gives us something simple to compare.ĪptX is still compression it's just a different kind of compression. For reference, if you pay for a Spotify Premium account, you can get up to 320 Kbps, but more on that in a moment. It has gotten better over the years, and on most devices runs at a bit rate of up to 345 kilobits per second. It was designed to use as little processing power as possible, given the lower power devices for which it was intended. This was done using a codec called SBC or "low complexity subband codec." It wasn't designed with perfect audio fidelity in mind. In the early days of Bluetooth, audio had to be compressed significantly to work at all. ![]() As the Bluetooth standard has advanced so has the size of its limited wireless "pipe." Which is to say, far more data can be transmitted over Bluetooth than when it first came out. ![]() It's shorter range, lower power and transfers less data than Wi-Fi. Bluetooth is a low-power wireless transmission designed to allow two devices to easily transfer data over short range. This isn't as noticeable now as it was in the early days of the format, thanks to better encoders, higher bit rates and more, but sometimes you can still tell the difference even on the cheapest headphones. Compressed audio, in theory, sounds worse than the uncompressed version of the same song. These codecs are called "lossy," as the sound removed is lost, and can't be recovered. The trade-off for convenience is quality. The Sennheiser Momentum 3 Wireless is another aptX-compatible high-end headphone. So in other words, there are 44,100 snapshots per second, and each snapshot has one of 65,536 potential values. The audio on a CD has 44,100 samples every second, and each sample has a value of somewhere between 0 and 65,535 (also called "16-bit"). ![]() With enough of these snapshots, or "samples," a playback device (an iPhone, say) can convert them back into a smooth sound wave. Instead of a steady wave of sound, it's a series of snapshots. Read more: The best headphones of 2020 Bluetooth audio: A quick primerĭigital audio is a collection of samples of what a sound wave looks like at a specific moment in time. It can have other benefits, though, so it's definitely worth learning about.īut before we can explain aptX, we need to talk about Bluetooth itself. That doesn't mean it's not potentially useful, just that it doesn't necessarily mean there's much, if any, audible improvement. In the early days of Bluetooth, aptX got a lot of attention due to its potential for far higher quality compared to the stock Bluetooth transmission.īluetooth technology has come a long way in the last decade or so - it's currently in its version 5 iteration - and as such, aptX isn't the panacea it once seemed. If you're the type of person who loves to scrutinize speaker and headphone feature lists, you've likely come across aptX hyped as an improvement in quality for the audio transmission between your source, like a phone or tablet, and your headphones or speakers. ![]()
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