A Behind-the-Scenes Look
at Bluetooth LE Audio

What has you most excited about LE Audio?

It’s definitely the rekindling of innovation by Bluetooth LE Audio and the many more advances in the wings that will propel Bluetooth^® technology from simply replacing wires to knitting together networks of devices by serving as an OS. Bluetooth LE Audio’s most impactful feature is bringing audio and data together natively in one radio for the first time in an interoperable manner, making dual-mode solutions based on proprietary profiles seem somewhat quaint and Rube Goldberg esque.  Having audio and telemetry side by side on the same radio hardware and protocol makes it easy for developers to combine the two and incorporate audio modalities into all sorts of novel devices, numbering way beyond just the smartphones and headphones we see today. In turn, that will bring music, communication, and voice touchpoints to even more parts of end-users’ lives in ways we can’t even imagine yet. And because much real-time biometric and sensing telemetry can be just as easily carried over the same isochronous channels that were created for Bluetooth LE Audio, it’s only a matter of time before such profiles are created for Bluetooth technology to deliver far richer experiences that are possible only with networks of devices working together to benefit the end user.

Can you share more about LC3?

LC3 is the first new Bluetooth codec in 14 years (since SBC), and it’s well suited for both music-grade audio and low-latency voice communication. Aside from a much higher compression ratio, there’s an aspect of LC3 which hasn’t gotten as much attention: a 10ms frame length. This is important because many of the applications that Bluetooth technology feeds into – such as VoIP, teleconferencing, and 5G/VoLTE – all use audio codecs with frame lengths that are multiples of 10ms. So, the 10ms of LC3 is much friendlier to systems than the 7.5ms used in classic HFP. While LC3 also has a mode that uses 7.5ms frame lengths, it doesn’t result in a proportionally lower latency as one might naturally expect, and its purpose is to help with backward compatibility. 

The future for Bluetooth technology is at 10ms because internet audio is at 10ms. Hence, I’m really looking forward to more edge and IoT devices, finding it convenient to integrate Bluetooth audio now that it has a 10ms codec.

What are some of the market challenges that Bluetooth LE Audio will address?

I see member companies being equipped to tackle two market challenges: tiny earbuds without compromises in latency and social music without the friction we see today.

• • Earbuds: Today’s wire-free earbuds all come with longer latencies, which make them suitable only for dual-mono voice or for consuming stored media from the cloud. The added latency arises from proprietary solutions having to creatively work around the point-to-point topology limitation of classic A2DP to maintain synchronization between the two buds, which, if inadequate, leads to undesirable effects like inconsistent stereo imaging or a wandering soundstage. On the other hand, synchronization comes for free by design with zero added latency in Bluetooth LE Audio for not just two streams, but as many streams as can fit in a Bluetooth link. And that brings us to what will come next: social music.
  • Social music: This is when you can share your music with your friend and even a group of friends. We all want it, but the wire-replacement model under which much of classic Bluetooth^® technology was designed gets in the way. That starts changing with this next generation of audio being built on the many-to-many model of Bluetooth Low Energy. It shows up first in the location-based audio sharing mentioned in the Bluetooth SIG’s press release at CES 2020. Next comes a dissonance-free transition between private enjoyment and the different degrees of social, and that is something that I greatly look forward to working on soon with other member companies – after we get the rest of Bluetooth LE Audio’s basic stack into the market.