
Bluetooth will support hearing aids, sharing, and a better audio codec - DiabloD3
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/6/21050631/bluetooth-hearing-aids-sharing-audio-le-lc3-codec-ces-2020
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stagger87
Previous discussion

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980558)

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shakna
Fantastic. Now all those incomplete, incompatible, barely coherent and
absolutely bug-ridden implementations will get better because Bluetooth will
now be an even larger specification! And the specification continues to have
flaws in itself!

I apologise for the sarcasm. The Bluetooth situation hasn't improved over the
years because the spec has. In part, yes. The spec is better. However the real
difference has been large players open-sourcing parts of their bluetooth
stack. However, even now, without a lot trying, you will find bugridden
implementations in both hardware and software.

That bluetooth works at all is a miracle.

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SlowRobotAhead
This is not bluetooth classic, BT as you know and hate it. It's BLE Audio. BLE
is MUCH better.

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shakna
I haven't had the displeasure of working much with "bluetooth classic", it's
BLE that I've spent most of my time with, and I absolutely hate it every time
I have to come back to it.

BLE is better. But it isn't hard to be better.

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SlowRobotAhead
Weird, I have had zero real issues with BLE. However, I'm on the device side,
GATT Server, not the phone (client) side. So I have much lower access than if
I was writing a Core Bluetooth app or something.

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shakna
I'm in embedded world. Writing realtime drivers has been... Painful. Fixing
existing realtime drivers has been worse. Almost every piece of hardware I've
touched hasn't complied with the spec in some way.

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prutschman
I'm glad to see the SIG improving the baseline audio codec. SBC is/was a weird
little codec.

It's like a dumbed-down MPEG-1 Layer-1 audio, but with only 8 sub-bands. Like
layer-1, the filterbank isn't perfect reconstruction, so the encode/decode
cycle causes aliasing noise even before any quantization takes place.

(At a previous job I had to make a proprietary extension that improved the
stop-band attenuation of the prototype filter, otherwise the speaker companies
didn't even want to talk to us, the THD+N looked so bad.)

The only psychoacoustic model is an optional static biasing of which sub-bands
gets bits allocated.

On the other hand, you can encode/decode entirely in software on a 24 MHZ
arm7tdmi. (arm7 is ARMv3, not ARMv7, confusingly).

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rektide
Giant middle finger to Linux users by using a new proprietary Fraunhofer
codec. We have finally gotten support for some of the other proprietary codecs
in Linux Bluetooth land, then Bluetooth SIG goes & picks a new proprietary
codec owned by the very very old guard. Another decade of mp3 licensing fees &
stacks of legal paperwork, just to encode or decode audio.

There's so many better ways this could have gone.

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layoutIfNeeded
Why didn’t they choose Opus?

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makomk
Because there's no juicy licensing money to be made from getting Opus into the
Bluetooth standard? Seriously, there's no real technical advantage to this
weird proprietary codec as far as I can tell - the performance and
computational complexity seem to be pretty much on a par with Opus, even based
on benchmarks and hardware that the new codec was designed to do well on.

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DenisM
I'd settle for lower latency.

Using bluetooth MIDI on my iPhone 11 Pro / Roland F-140R combo produces an
occasional 1/3 second latency for some key-presses. Adding bluetooth audio on
top produces 2 second latency in the music itself.

So close, yet so far.

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mlrtime
hearing aids already support BT. I know people that are nearly deaf and have
invisible hearing aids. They can answer the phone with BT connectivity. This
is fairly recent.

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SlowRobotAhead
They support BT Classic, not BLE Audio which is what this is. The issue with
BT Classic in hearing aids is as far as I know the same issue with most BT
devices, the pairing and constant connectivity.

I've found BLE to be much more forgiving. BUT, the BT SIG is a special group,
we'll see how they mess this up.

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SlowRobotAhead
To all the sarcasic and nonsense posts here...

This is not Bluetooth Classic. Your impressions (and mine) of shitty speakers
that lose connection until 2am and randomly start playing something don't
apply.

This is BLE now with an Audio stream. It's not the same. BT and BLE share
radio, and GAP profile, maybe L2CAP, everything else is entirely different.

I'm not saying BT SIG didn't mess this up in special ways, but no, you don't
know anything about this yet.

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privateSFacct
Bluetooth using Airpods pros seems to be about 140ms latency vs speakers at
about 60 ms. So a difference of 80ms. Others have differences 184ms - so more
than double the latency. Could bluetooth adopt whatever apple is doing?

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paulie_a
Bluetooth already supports hearing aids

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SamuelAdams
I was confused by this too. I've been wearing hearing aids all my life, and my
latest pair (bought in 2014) was always able to connect to my iPhone via
bluetooth. How is this new "Bluetooth LE Audio" different from what we have
today?

It would be nice if I could connect my hearing aids to my computer and listen
to skype calls, music, youtube, etc. But so far I've only been able to connect
to iOS and Android devices. Maybe this change will fix that?

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shakna
> How is this new "Bluetooth LE Audio" different from what we have today?

The new audio codec should be of a much higher quality, though it does match
what some proprietary systems have already been doing. Not just "quality"
improvements, but the tinny aftertones and so on should just about vanish in
all circumstances. Normalisation will work better. It'll be easier to pick out
voices in a crowd, etc.

BLE should be much lower latency. Potentially anywhere between half and a
third. Which should be a huge quality-of-life improvement for those using
bluetooth hearing aids.

BLE is _somewhat_ simpler, and has decent adoption throughout the software
industry. So connecting to Windows, macOS, Linux should be possible. (The
Linux story is complicated by the new audio codec - its nonfree and patent
encumbered). If they've done their job right, you'll be able to connect your
hearing aids like any other output device, with a quick and simple pair from
whatever Bluetooth menu.

However, BLE is also known for more frequent dropouts related to battery usage
spikes. Not directly because of the spec. Because the people implementing it
have done a worse job thus far. If that remains the case, then it is fairly
useless as a hearing aid tool.

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ForHackernews
> Bluetooth may really get better next year

If you believe this, I've got a bridge to sell you.

It basically doesn't matter what "bluetooth" the absurd, bloated standard
says. What matters is what implementers do, and what they'll do is hack
together the cheapest, fastest version that kinda-barely works on cheapo
Chinese hardware and test it only with a couple popular Apple devices.

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ipsum2
Products with Bluetooth 5.0 are a lot easier to use than Bluetooth 2.0 from
10+ years back, in my opinion.

