For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8, so you can see just how long Windows is sleeping on this. I’m excited about the incoming next gen called LC3plus, my next pair is definitely gonna have that.
Ldac is not actually that good, it’s actually fairly rare that LDAC beats out something like SBC XQ let alone AAC
EDIT: for elaboration, LDAC works at 3 main data rate ranges 990/909, 660/606 and 330/303. Ldac is only high res at the 990 range, and even at that range, it still often looses when pipewire is compiled against libfdk. keep in mind that it’s hard to get real numbers on LDAC because decoding is proprietary, meaning I had to disassemble headphones and connect those for verification, but typically AAC on supported headphones beat out 990kbps LDAC (which is hilarious btw considering LDAC can rarely actually work at 990kbps anyways) and both SBC-XQ and LC3Plus (both of which are usable with pipewire) regularly beat 660kbps LDAC.
TLDR LDAC is crap and SBC-XQ is typically more accurate and lower latency, and LC3Plus is even better then that. and if you have AAC compatible headphones assuming latency isnt a major issue (which you are using LDAC so it’s not) just use AAC, both fidelity and latency is better
EDIT: I should mention, it is known that vendors will tune codecs, I believe Valdikks article in habr briefly goes over this. so it’s very possible that tuning could mean that x codec, including LDAC could be the only good codec, however with how badly LDAC maintains 990kbps, I doubt it will make much of a difference
keep in mind that it’s hard to get real numbers on LDAC because decoding is proprietary
I used to think the same. But as it turns out, a decoder exists. Maybe some people don’t want anyone to know about it to keep the myths alive ;)
EDIT: Also, as a golden rule, whenever anyone sees the words High-Res in an audio context, they should immediately realize that they are being bullshitted.
just because a decoder exists doesnt mean it’s good and usable, and it also doesn’t mean you are legally allowed to use it without the appropriate licensing
the point is, it’s not something I’ve been able to test, and im not sure if this will change that, But I suppose I can at least do testing with what I have.
You all got a valid point… it’s just that mileage varies and x codec will sound better in y combination. If I remember right, AAC on Android is at times implemented differently than on it’s home Apple: The encoder would work with smaller bitrates to save battery. There must be a special synergy for max bitrate LDAC to sound worse than AAC, indeed. All in all my post is about being open minded and giving you the option to use a thing, rather than finding out what codec is universally the best: You virtually can’t, can you?
at 990/909 kbps bluetooth can hardly hold that bitrate unless you have really good conditions so much as walking down a stream will bring it down to 660kbps
and yes, AAC does have better fidelity, at 320kbps AAC and Opus are largely transparent to 90% of users keep in mind I am comparing fdkaac on Pipewire, NOT android, this is an important distinction since they were testing android, and you can see here how spotty AAC is on android soundguys.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-bluetooth-hea…
I am talking specifcally about linux in this context
EDIT: also it’s not about being an apple fanboy, Opus is largely just as good, marginally better, but no headphones support them, if you want you can even compile pipewire with higher bitrate limits on opus for stereo, (IIRC the pro profile can override it? cant remember but code is here gitlab.freedesktop.org/…/a2dp-codec-opus.c)
opus is transparent for all the the most intense songs by 160kbps, and for regular stuff you’d hear on the radio it’s transparent anywhere from 96kbps-128kbps
while this is the case for a lot of songs, a lot of instrument heavy songs can cause noticeable artifacting for some people. It’s pretty rare, but in the end, it’s not like we are storing the media so why care? we can do upto 320kbps for a stereo stream, and as far as I am aware, it’s not like there are any detriments to doing so (maybe marginally higher power usage I guess).
I wasn’t able to myself, but I did have a friend test the snug space endless lane, and they were able to fairly reliably tell the difference between 128kbps and the original rip. the In the moonlight track too has a high pitch… triangle maybe? that can exhibit artifact too.
so like, yeah, but we have the 320kbps we can work with, so like, why not?
Any way to see which bitrate is currently being used? I know you can set it to use only 909kbps, 606kbps or 303kbps in the wireplumber config, but I am curious which bitrate the adaptive mode (usually) uses.
Are you thinking of the standby timeout? Cause I get static on my speakers on any and all distros when no audio is playing. It always happens after 5 seconds of silence. Kinda infuriating that I have to do this on EVERY SINGLE DAMN INSTALL.
permanent fix is to add the line:
options snd-hda-intel power_save=0
to the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
For pipewire:
create folder /etc/wireplumber/main.lua.d/ if it does not exist
if you had to create it yourself just copy over the file from /usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua
otherwise it probably is there already then just edit it
pretty much at the bottom there is a line that says “session.suspend-timout-seconds”
uncomment it and set its value to 0
then reboot
Is the APTX-HD latency good enough for gaming? (And can be used for VoIP?).
I don’t know much about BT… But I know that my Pixel buds series A, have terrible latency for gaming unless I use them in headset mode (which then has terrible quality).
In isolation aptx-hd when operating in aptx-ll mode is low enough latency that it can be used for gaming, however it’s very rare that standard bluetooth headphones will be low enough latency, at the very least I haven’t personally tested any devices that fit the bill when operating in aptx-hd. Im sure some bluetooth headphones will be able to, but none that i’ve come across. LC3Plus might actually be able to change this. IMO running a bluetooth dac is much more likely to get there.
Side by side test with my headphones showed better speration of the range (including bass) and a more solid connection, especially while flying. Kept having LADC constantly try to bitrate switch on me, and when I set it on highest quality it kept cutting in and out at times. Sample size of 1 so YMMV.
You can change it once connected, but every time it defaults back to LDAC
ah, yeah a couple phones do this, IIRC SetEdit can fix this, but you should be careful if you do try to use it since it opens up a lot of settings that shouldnt be tinkered with
For me it all depends on what I connect to, my head unit in the car defaults to AAC, my portable BT speaker is using LDAC, my bookshelf is using AptX-HD.
Thanks Android for supporting all of them automatically!
I believe @twei meant, if you open a terminal and put in the following command:
pactl info | grep “Server Name” the output should tell you what sound server you are using.
Not better. There is no way to know if you have “System Taskmaster” installed, as I have never heard of software named that, and their process is system agnostic.
Pulseaudio and pipewire are kind of like audio drivers (not exactly but anyway). Let’s say you’re running spotify and discord. They both send their audio to pipewire. You can then use pipewire to control how loud each one is. It also supports more complex use cases like if you’re streaming, you can hook up the spotify output and your microphone mixed together into discord’s input so that the mixed audio will be streamed.
Pipewire is newer and basically replaces another system called jack that did the same thing for pulseaudio.
LC3plus is worse than AAC quality wise (to be expected). Lower latency is the only thing going for it. And that’s just because AAC is a very high-latency codec. Opus (as a format) would win on both fronts, although there could be issues with creating a high-quality encoder for it that is not too complex, and power-efficient.
After testing LC3Plus, Opus, and AAC personally for bluetooth, LDAC claims are BS, but for the usecase for bluetooth, LC3Plus is more then sufficient, I don’t know why people keep quoting this post, under normal usecase, you get 3-6x the bitrate being tested, under which case all three codecs sound transparent with LC3Plus maybe dipping a little low. however latency is significantly better then AAC (tested against libfdk) and marginally better then opus
After testing LC3Plus, Opus, and AAC personally for bluetooth, LDAC claims are BS
How did you test Opus for bluetooth?
latency is significantly better then AAC (tested against libfdk) and marginally better then opus
In case you didn’t know, you can use 10ms (or even 5ms) frames with Opus instead of the default (20ms). 10ms should roughly match LC3plus’s default latency while still retaining high quality.
Pipewire currently supports opus for both ways 10ms is what I benched against and for testing you get a wackload of SBCs and Bluetooth chips and test that, 5ms frames were largely unusable. I wanted to take a look at the pinebuds, but it cost like 40 dollars in shipping or something retarded like that to canada, and im not gonna bother with that
if you want something else, google headphones support opus, but it uses their own headers and stuff so it’s not compatible with pipewire, only google phones IIRC
I definitely love it for the “it just works” (or rather, you have full control to make it work) factor!
I’m not familiar with the latest in BT audio, but isn’t the standard still sub-par in that it has very limited overall frequency bandwidth, resulting in deep sacrifices to fidelity?
I recall a detailed analysis of different BT audio codecs a while back, and the spectrum analysis always showed relatively high noise floor and frequency roll-off (hi-cut/low-cut) within the threshold of human hearing (though admittedly close to the limits). Also, I recall (and this could just be the 2016 tech I am familiar with) that overall bandwidth was limited in that if you played something with low frequency tones, the upper frequencies were dropped, or vice versa. I used to confirm this by using a flat EQ setting, then boosting any range, and you could easily detect the loss of frequency response in the adjacent or distant ranges.
It is worse than uncompressed, but 990Kbps LDAC is the closest codec to totally transparent I’ve heard for Bluetooth audio. AptX HD is nearly as good to my ears, and is better than 660Kbps LDAC. The differences are very small though, especially when compared with the differences on the analog side, e.g. the amp, and particularly the headphone design.
Apple side-steps the problem by, at least when you’re listening to Apple Music, simply sending the AAC stream as-is to the headphones and has them decode the audio. I don’t know why that isn’t a more common approach.
I’m still somewhat bemused that we’re talking about Bluetooth codecs at all. It surely can’t be that difficult technically to get 1.5Mbps actual throughput on Bluetooth and simply send raw 16-bit/44.1Khz PCM. 2.4Ghz WiFi is capable of hundreds of times that speed. Bluetooth has been stuck at the same speeds for decades.
this isnt even correct, AAC beats 990kbps LDAC, aptx-HD and SBC-XQ matches or beats 660kbps (which is normal listening usecase).
however even after all of that, SBC-XQ, AAC, LC3Plus are all audibly transparent to the vast majority of people at normal listening bitrates with the major difference being vendor tuning
I can only comment on my experience with my own equipment and ears, but in my experience, 990Kbps LDAC is noticeably more transparent than 256Kbps AAC for Bluetooth audio.
I can fairly reliably guess whether or not I remembered to switch my Sony XM4s out of multipoint mode the last time I used them (when in multipoint pairing mode LDAC is not supported and 256Kbps AAC is usually what gets negotiated). The difference is small, but over a few minutes of listening, the sonic signature when it’s using AAC is just a little bit “off” and my ears don’t like it as much.
Could I ABX the difference using the usual ABX setup with short samples of music I’m not familiar with? Probably not. Can I tell the difference over an extended period using music I know well, and that I often listen to uncompressed? Yes, pretty easily.
LDAC is not a particularly sophisticated codec, but it doesn’t have to be when it has a 990Kbps bitrate. It’s also possible that the FDK-AAC codec that I think both Pipewire and Android use for real-time AAC encoding is not the best tuned for 256Kbps CBR. AIUI in 256Kbps CBR mode, FDK-AAC has a hard low-pass filter at 17KHz, and I can still hear above 17KHz.
FDK-AAC on linux is considerably better, I dont think I did a bitrate mod on it but I may have? I think pipewire by default caps AAC at 320kbps and can hold it reliably, and at 256k both opus and FDKAAC are transparent to the vast majority of people even on high end audio setups.
I'd love to say the same but on my Lenovo laptop I get frequent disconnects with bluetooth earphones on Linux alone. Apparently it's a firmware problem with the AX200 board, but even after having updated the firmware and following all the online fixes I still have the problem.
My whole use case for my laptop is getting away from my desk when I want to read something and listen to music at the end of the day, but it's annoying to have to reconnect the earphones every 10 or so minutes. Like everything Linux, it's incredible as long as you have supported hardware and you don't bump into some weird edge case.
I’ve had BT disconnect issues on a 2015 HP EB 840 G2 paired with my ancient Logitech UE speaker. Not sure if it’s the implementation of bluez on mxlinux or my actual bt hardware on the laptop. The result for me is similar to yours: laptop is flaky, so my phone remains my playback source of choice.
For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8
LDAC is great, but simply stating that the encoder is “open source” is quite misleading (while technically correct). The codec is owned by Sony and heavily licensed. It’s a savvy business move of Sony to make the encoder free to use though, so everyone else can support their standard while charging manufacturers who want to integrate it into their headphones.
If we want a really free and open high quality codec, we should push for opus support via bluetooth
Yes… I made double sure to mention ‘encoder’ between that.
Xiph really won the lossy codec scene with Opus and I transcoded all my junk to that format. Hitting (my personal) transparency on 128k vbr is flat out impressive and it warms my heart that corpos won’t have a reason to collect taxes for basic things like audio codec. However it’s a different story with bluetooth audio codec in which I hope will change.
Xiph really won the lossy codec scene with Opus and I transcoded all my junk to that format. Hitting (my personal) transparency on 128k vbr is flat out impressive
Same here. I’ve left myself a bit of a safety margin at 144k vbr, but having my whole library at transparent quality AND portable size is very convenient.
Though, now that opus 1.4 is out I feel a bit of anxiety whether i should re-encode everything from flac->opus1.4
I use foobar2k via wine. Yes, you may stone me. Tip: You will save heaps of space by not embedding the cover on each file, just put a cover.jpg in the albums folder, virtually any player will pick it up.
Tip: You will save heaps of space by not embedding the cover on each file, just put a cover.jpg in the albums folder, virtually any player will pick it up.
Except when streaming the file or copying a random file to another location. embedded art is pretty convenient, 500x500 is plenty large enough and doesn’t take a lot of space (~50KB)
same as @denissimo I use foobar2000 + wine. ffmpeg is alright, but fb2k is very convenient (especially for replaygain tagging). Afterwards I usually give the files a Picard treatment to get proper tags + covers.
Totally get this, but doesn’t it just matter less over time? 400 megs in my pocket would have been unthinkable some years ago, but now that I’ve got a 500GB SD card, I care a lot less (and thus, why transcode)?
And data storage is always getting cheaper, not the other way around.
Transcoding to a (for them) transparent lossy result is perfectly fine if all you do is listen. I couldn’t care less about “audio qualities” that I cannot hear.
If we want a really free and open high quality codec, we should push for opus support via bluetooth
Isn’t the new default codec in BLE Audio LC3 free and open and high quality? And it’s required for BLE Audio support, so there will be more and more devices that support it.
LC3Plus is more then sufficient for transparent audio at the typical rates you will achieve with bluetooth, 160k is really low and you can normally sustain around 300-600kbps which is more then sufficient for LC3Plus. this test is IMO flawed for the intents and purposes for bluetooth audio
EDIT: LC3Plus caps at 512kbps, I cant remeber if that is before or after FEC (forwards error correction, not to be mistaken with PLC, Packet Loss concealment, FEC is kinda like raid, PLC hides dropped data)
Not anything to do with the LDAC codec but why does wireless headphones on windows suck. On linux (even a wm) I just turn on my headphones and it works, on windows every time I have to remove the device and add it back again
I was trying to connect headphones on my partners Windows machine and it was a disaster. Most of the time it failed to pair, the rest of the time it paired but didn’t recognize as an audio device. We tried with 2 different devices and both worked perfectly on Linux and Android.
It’s the same for me. I thought it’s due to the motherboard I’m using, windows being the problem never crossed my mind. The only thing that worked well and didn’t have to be re-installed after a disconnect was the new xbox controller, so I feel like maybe there’s something fishy going on here.
The only thing in my head is the time where people didn’t know it had backdoors and telemetry. I think Windows XP actually didn’t have backdoors but I just assume this rn.
The only thing that worked well and didn’t have to be re-installed after a disconnect
I didn’t have the same experience at all. I’ve used a Bluetooth Xbox controller for years, and it’s worked great… As long as it was only in Bluetooth. If you try to plug it in, let’s say to recharge it or because you want a more reliable connection, you won’t be able to reconnect it in Bluetooth, unless you unpair the device first. Apparently, that is even the _expected behavior", for some reason.
The only way to disable that behavior is to go the the Windows device settings and preventing the controller from being recognized as a USB device, so it only uses the USB as a charging port. Another solution would be to connect the controller to a power plug instead of a USB port of the PC to recharge it, but how unintuitive is that? Imagine if Nintendo, Sony, Apple or even Microsoft themselves on Xbox pulled that? That whenever you plugged in your wireless controller to your device, it suddenly stopped working wirelessly? Out of all the smaller or bigger quirks of Windows, this one has been one of the most unnerving to me for a very long time.
What about wireless headphones that don’t use bluetooth? I think I had some Logitech ones that did not use bluetooth. Are those a viable alternative to bluetooth on linux?
Bluetooth stacks are notorious for being gargantuan spaghetti code base. People have been trying to put out all those little fires because it’s more possible on Linux than Windows.
The standards are terribly complex and the reference implementations were originally written by the standards groups.
Then to keep compatibility everything has to be broken in the same way as the reference implementations which put more effort into “it works this time” than any kind of resilience.
I’m still on 10 myself so I can’t say for sure. I remember I needed to go into device manager and disable but not uninstall the Microsoft stack, and stop it from automatically updating.
It’ll break the Bluetooth settings/control panel and you’ll need to re-pair all devices via the new icon in the system tray. It looks basically the same as the old one and both might be present, so I advise hiding the old one.
I also seem to recall having to change a setting relating to the pairing password. Maybe? Sorry it’s been a while since I got it set up and it’s worked flawlessly ever since so the details are a bit fuzzy.
Man, Anker makes the best price for performance headphones in my opinion. I have the Life 2 Neos and love the sound quality and battery life. They can take a beating too as I used to wear them doing blue collar work so they’ve taken a few nice hits and still work fine.
Where the hell do you still buy Anker headphones? I’m in germany and holding on to my soundbuds flow because nothing else even comes close to comparison. I get Anker chargers and adapters and cables and whatever but nothing audio related to a point I thought they gave up on the whole branch.
Good to know. Might have to check them out then as my older Sonys die. Iirc DankPods “reviewed” some Soundcore headphones as an alternative to Raycons a while back.
If you’re looking for a replacement for Soundbuds Flow (i.e. ~€20), you’ll be disappointed. For me, Soundbuds Flow were perfect for workouts. Cheap and I didn’t care too much about sound quality. Anker rebooted their audio line and focuses on mid-range to high-end products.
Yeah Soundcore buds and headphones are damn impressive for their price. The Liberty Pro 2s were my first TW earbuds, and I bought them after reading glowing reviews. I still have them as my backup earbuds.
I have their Soundcore Space A40, and the battery life is legitimately amazing. The case lasts me a week of heavy usage, and the buds easily go 6-10 hours depending on how heavily I use the ANC. If the buds get low, tossing them into the case charges them back up most of the way in 15-20 minutes.
The ANC isn’t perfect, but it’s made my recent flights way more tolerable by cutting out most of the noise from the engines while still letting the voice of my seatmate through.
Definitely. I have a pair of pixel buds that give me very noticeable latency when paired in Windows. I’ve never been able to find a way to use the low latency codecs to fix this.
In Linux it’s a complete opposite experience. I have a menu with every codec in the book, and I can actually watch video in Linux without even noticing any latency now.
Sony did drop the ball with LDAC quite quickly, it could’ve been the new standard.
But with the release of the WH-1000XM3s (or was it the 4s?) they basically made most of the selling points incompatible with LDAC, so now almost no one uses it anymore.
Yes, LDAC and multipoint do not mix hence I’m looking forward to LC3plus that replaces it. To be fair it’s not a big issue to roll back to AAC or even SBC to use multipoint, because you probably aren’t gonna notice a difference when you don’t listen to high res apps like Tidal. It also should be known that a good codec does not fix mediocre drivers and/or chips. Regardless, Linux shines in letting you use a feature you did pony up for. :)
Have a look at Technics A800/AZ60/AZ60MK2/AZ80, all support simultaneous use of LDAC and multipoint. I recall something else working with both simultaneously too, possibly Huawei TWS.
They do step down a quality tier to do so, and low bitrste LDAC is generally considered poor, but it’s otherwise all there and possible.
I have a Radsone ES100 Bluetooth DAC/headphone amp, and that supports LDAC, multipoint, and doesn’t compromise the LDAC bitrate when you have multipoint enabled. You can even leave it plugged in as a USB DAC and still use multipoint BT with LDAC, and it switches smoothly between the sources depending on which device started playing a stream most recently.
I was distinctly underwhelmed by the BT implementation when I got my Sony XM4s, it’s kinda weak by comparison.
I bought them for their noise cancelling primarily, and they’re excellent at that, but otherwise they’re not great. The un-EQed frequency response is terrible for headphones in their price range: flabby, wildly over-exaggerated bass and no mids at all. Running without EQ I can barely hear lyrics - every singer sounds like they’re mumbling underwater. I’ve had $20 IEMs with better tonal balance. They respond well to EQ but the on-board EQ doesn’t have enough frequency bands to even come close to fixing them. Wavelet on Android doing EQ duty makes them listenable. Even when you do EQ them properly, they still sound a bit dull and lifeless.
No idea how they got so much praise when they were launched. The power of marketing budgets I guess. For a while I was gaslighting myself thinking I had a faulty pair or maybe there was something going wrong with my hearing, but having heard another pair, and doing comparisons with my other headphones - most of which are far cheaper - I realised that no, they’re just not very good as headphones.
I agree wholeheartedly and would add ‘borderline unusable for voice calls’ to the XM4’s sins, which is admittedly an improvement over ‘entirely unusable for voice calls’ ala XM3/XM2/1000X. Spent quite a while trying to get the XM4 to sound ‘good’, and they just won’t.
The 1000X series has reached a level of critical mass otherwise only touched by AirPods in consumer headphoneland - people have heard of them, and want them, and read reviews which say ‘best for most people’, and their friends recommend them, and they want them more. And they buy them, and 5 stars A+++ these are the best headphones they’ve ever heard. Which is their truth. Meets the expectations of most, and exceeds for those who haven’t experienced top-tier ANC before.
Credit where it is due, Sony managed to make a product with a traditional Japanese letter-letter-number-number model, and made it famous enough to ask for by name. It is the consistency in product and marketing plus the halo effect that’s seen 1000X series reach critical mass. Reviews saying ‘actually I don’t like how these sound and struggle to get them sounding much better with the rubbish in-app EQ that doesn’t have a slider corresponding to the ~200Hz spike’ aren’t common.
We live in a world where AirPods and Spotify are good enough for most people. I’m just glad there’s room in the market for well-tuned over-ear ANC cans too.
AAC hurts my ears. Not sure why since I can’t hear a difference between it and LDAC without listening very carefully, but after half an hour or so I need to switch it to something else because it becomes more and more uncomfortable.
Switching between LDAC/multipoint mode means rebooting the headphones and connecting them again, so it’s a massive hassle. That makes multipoint absolutely useless to me. I personally won’t be buying sony headphones (or anything else that comes with an app) in the future because of that.
On my headphones, you can either use LDAC with one device or SBC/AAC with two devices. I can only change it via the app. Is there a similar setting for you?
The ios app is the only way that I can command the headphones to connect to a second device. When 2 device mode is going on, I have no idea what the connection is like in ios but Linux plainly tells me that it can only do SBC and SBC-XQ. When I turn off 2 device mode, and pair it again, LDAC is finally offered. My 1000xm4 doesn’t offer AAC, I don’t think I have anything around that sinks AAC. My Steamdeck can work as an Opus sink lol.
Add comment