
Announcing Bluetooth LE Audio - dsalzman
https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/bluetooth-technology/le-audio/
======
ShakataGaNai
The "Broadcast" mode is really an interesting concept - depending on the
available range. There are a lot of potential uses for this technology beyond
the basic. Of course "I can share my headphones with you" is great, in the day
in age of watching moves on iPads in say a plane. However I think in a
business setting the broadcasts could be used for all sorts of cool bits.

Remember the TV's in airports running news on mute? Now just tune in your
broadcast bluetooth!

Museums and art galleries don't need to provide audio guide devices - just
tune into the broadcast. Might even be able to do multiple broadcasts, one for
each language, for each station.

Silent discos without the need for custom headphones.

Mass transit (trains, buses, subway stations, airport) could broadcast
announcements, the same way they do now over speakers, so those who have a
hard time hearing the announcements (or just have headphones in anyways) could
actually hear them. This would be particularly great if you could listen to
your own personal audio source (ex music) AND get the BT broadcasted
announcements.

~~~
rwem
The killer application for this technology is a bicycle bell you can use to
break the trance of phone-staring pedestrians who are randomly staggering down
the pavement.

~~~
Lammy
A bicycle is a road vehicle. You shouldn’t be riding on the sidewalk.

~~~
city41
There are valid shared bike/pedestrian spaces, like bike trails. Zoned out
pedestrians on phones/headphones are extremely common there.

~~~
unsignedchar
Yes, they can be extra dangerous if they have, say, a curious dog on a long
leash on the other side of said trail while they’re busy counting Facebook
likes

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jdietrich
_> LE Audio is Multi-Stream_

Praise be to the heavens - we can finally have Bluetooth headphones that don't
revert to low-bitrate mono if the microphone is active.

~~~
daze42
YES! This has been bothering me for so long. I'm shocked it's taken them this
long to iron it out. I hope the device manufacturers implement it soon.

Edit: on second read, I'm not so sure LE Audio will address this issue.

"Multi-Stream Audio will enable the transmission of multiple, independent,
synchronized audio streams between an audio source device, such as a
smartphone, and one or more audio sink devices."

This sounds like it's referring to stereo or other multichannel audio, not
bidirectional. Hopefully I'm wrong.

~~~
jdietrich
_> on second read, I'm not so sure LE Audio will address this issue._

The current issue is that headsets only support a single stream and A2DP isn't
bidirectional, so the connection has to revert to the low-fidelity Headset
Profile. Multistream means that each stereo channel and the microphone should
operate fully independently. If this doesn't fix the issue, then it'll be a
spectacularly boneheaded error, even by the standards of the Bluetooth SIG.

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klodolph
I’m really looking forward to a new range of incompatibilities between
Bluetooth audio devices, as well as the new complications this introduces into
the Bluetooth software stack.

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krastanov
Will phones/computers that have bluetooth 4 or 5 be able to transmit bluetooth
LE audio? Is it just a BLE feature that can be added in software, or is it a
completely new standard?

~~~
makarhum
Most likely no. LE Audio requires controller support for Isochronous channels
which is major part of Bluetooth 5.2. Usually firmware updates for bt chipsets
are more like bug fixes than new features.

~~~
rasz
Not to mention majority of devices on the market already ship from the factory
with depleted firmware update slots.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nI9ok7iQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nI9ok7iQg)

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lxe
Where can I find more about LC3 codec? What about LE audio specs? Is this open
source or do they sell licenses for this?

~~~
xd1936
I too am interested in this. The only thing I've been able to dig up so far is
that it's a new codec, built for BT LE Audio, that seems to have been designed
by Synopsys[1]

1\. [https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/synopsys-
rel...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/synopsys-releases-
industry-s-first-bluetooth-le-audio-codec-for-power-sensitive-audio-and-voice-
applications-1028799666)

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jagged-chisel
I personally would not have predicted something like this was needed. How long
has this been in the works? Now that I can see how useful this is, I'm amazed
this didn't happen much sooner. Is this one case where "we" knew we needed it,
but the tech just wasn't available?

~~~
dsteinman
Bluetooth LE uses substantially less battery than older Bluetooth devices do.
It makes a big difference for anything that's battery powered. I was really
bummed when I found out BLE didn't support audio at all.

I can't quite tell from the website, but I'm assuming we will need new BT
antennas BLE Audio support before we can use it, which sadly means yet another
generation of computers & smartphones have to come out before this can become
ubiquitous.

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chrisco255
I love the use case of being able to sync with local audio sources, whether in
the gym, the airport, a cafe, or a retail store. I wonder if an "audio sink"
can then turnaround and rebroadcast the input to a different sink, creating a
sort of chain of local communication?

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nwah1
Is LC3 superior to existing codecs like Opus?

~~~
0-_-0
Opus is not low complexity

~~~
nwah1
Found this:

LC3 at 32 kbps (LC3 32) provides significantly better audio quality than Opus-
CELT at 32 kbps and complexity level 0 (OPUS_v114_c0 and COPUS_v114_c0).

[https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_tr/103500_103599/103590/01...](https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_tr/103500_103599/103590/01.01.01_60/tr_103590v010101p.pdf)

~~~
throw0101a
I'm of the opinion that Codec 2 [0][1] should pause on trying to perform
better at lower and lower bit rates, and put some work into higher ones.

Getting down to 700 and even 450 b/s is neat and all, but there seems (to me)
to be a gap between 4000 and 10000 b/s in the patent-free space.

* [0] [http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452](http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452)

* [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_2)

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emptybits
Scenario: Two people, quiet room, watching TV, each wearing their own
Bluetooth headphones to listen together. As I understand Bluetooth audio
standards, until now, this is impossible without additional hardware to split
the source and allow multiple 1:1 pairings. Ugh.

Will this seemingly simple scenario be handled by Bluetooth LE Audio? I'm
reading about its one-source:multi-sink capability with some hope.

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more_corn
In slightly related news, does anyone know where in the Bluetooth spec soft
power buttons are required? (press for three seconds to turn on, oh wait it
was already on, not it's off, press for three more seconds...) My biggest
complaints with Bluetooth are exacerbated by the fact that it's not possible
to flick a power button off and back on again.

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davefp
Just yesterday I was discussing how one might do live translation for someone
speaking to a multi-lingual group, for example a tour guide at a museum. The
broadcast features mentioned here would make things way easier, and people
could use their own headphones to boo.

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lightedman
This literally addresses none of my complaints regarding Bluetooth Audio.

Latency needs to be on the order of single-digit milliseconds. LC3 can achieve
around 20. One order of magnitude too high.

Audio needs to not sound like it's being played underwater.

And give me 100 feet of range.

~~~
ulfw
"Audio needs to not sound like it's being played underwater."

What kind of bluetooth have you been using? Modern codecs sound perfectly
fine.

~~~
monocasa
Modern codecs are non standard vendor extensions.

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TylerE
A2DP standard supports both MP3 or AAC.

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monocasa
Optionally.

~~~
Kirby64
Right, which pretty much any modern device and host supports. Any Android
phone since 8.0 should have LDAC. Pretty much any headphones you would use
with this should also have LDAC or AAC (or both).

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tjoff
Man I hope they have a good plan for fixing pairing with all the millions of
different devices.

Either that or the whole ordeal will be hilarious to watch.

~~~
andor
Bluetooth LE is a completely different protocol and fixes the pairing issues.

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DaniFong
really interested in latency here

~~~
xnyan
It's not mentioned, seeing as this was a press release if it was better than
the current standard then one would assume they would have mentioned it.
Assuming this is the case, 200-500ms in real world conditions. With super
duper non-standard proprietary tech on both ends from vendors like Qualcomm it
can be in theory be as as low as 32ms, but in practice I don't see those
numbers. New airpods with apple's proprietary tech get mid 100s ms of latency
and that is considered pretty good for BT headphones in the real world.

BT5 does make things better if for no other reason than less re-transmits vs 4
in the same conditions.

~~~
Kirby64
Yeah, according to some news articles, I see Airpods Pro have a latency of
~144ms end-to-end. I haven't noticed that latency when I watch videos on my
phone... On the other hand, I definitely noticed the latency with a much
cheaper pair of true wireless earbuds. They probably had the ~500ms latency
you mention.

I wonder how much the real-world latency is. If the codec itself is only
adding 20ms, what about the rest of the system?

~~~
xnyan
Definitely not an expert in BT but I've worked with it on the edges. Bluetooth
is the biggest standard I've ever worked with by far in just terms of sheer
page count, to say nothing of its complexity. That's just the core spec, not
any of the other pieces you need too to make it do useful work.

I would not believe the 20ms number without real world performance benchmarks
tested in operational conditions for my specific product but if that is what
is actually happening, I suspect something with the implementation on the
specific platform is to blame - again, the standard is ridiculously complex
and hard to implement. It's notoriously bad on android (by bad I mean a
dumpster fire) and while windows is actually been making progress, depending
on the SoC of the physical adapter your experience can range from great to
near android level dumpster fire.

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randyrand
Odd that they don't include power consumption specs.

