New Bluetooth Codec Promises Lossless Audio
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Richard Baguley Published on August 01, 2007 Comment on this |
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Aug 1st 2007 - When you listen to music on a cell phone over Bluetooth headphones; you aren't getitng the whole picture. Your cell phone compresses the audio so it can be transmitted over Bluetooth, discarding the bits it thinks you can't hear. But Open Interface North America (OINA) has a solution; they've just developed a new way of transmitting audio over Bluetooth that doesn't result in any loss of audio quality. Their new SOUNDAbout codec (compressor/decompressor, the software that compresses the audio for transmisson and decompresses it when received) uses a different type of compression to existing Bluetooth devices. OINA claims that their codec produces audiophile quality that is indistinguishable from the original, with OINA Chief Technology Officer Greg Burns making the ambitious claim that “Wireless stereo headphones, for example, can now have exactly the same performance as a wired headphone”. OINA also claim that their new codec requires less computing power to work, which should mean cheaper Bluetooth devices and longer battery life. And they also say that the latency (the time delay introduced by the compression/decompression process) is much less than existing codecs, which means better lip-synching when watching videos.
However, we won't see the new codec on devices for a few months. Although they have it up and running, they still have to make it work on the various different types of chips inside cell phones and Bluetooth headsets, as well as persuading the cell phone manufacturers to add the new codec to their products. There is no indication yet as to when this will happen.
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