Qualcomm releases aptX Lossless, promising CD-quality audio over Bluetooth

AptX Adaptive works with “Qualcomm Bluetooth High-Speed Link” technology to deliver CD-quality lossless audio for throughput beyond 1Mbits/s.

Smartphones have been shedding headphone jack for a long time now. While wireless earphones have been there for a few years, they are still considered a bit inferior compared to the wired counterparts. Companies have, however, improved the Bluetooth audio standard a lot in the past few years.

Improving upon this, Qualcomm has developed a new Bluetooth audio standard called aptX Adaptive, which promises to deliver CD-quality lossless audio over Bluetooth. AptX Lossless can deliver bit-for-bit CD-quality audio with bit rate scalability between 1Mb/s – 140Kbit/s. Qualcomm claims there is no data loss when audio is encoded and decoded with aptX Lossless. The lossless audio mode will be automatically enabled when aptX Adaptive detects the source file is lossless.

AptX Adaptive works with “Qualcomm Bluetooth High-Speed Link” technology to deliver CD-quality lossless audio for throughput beyond 1Mbits/s. However, when required, it can scale down to 140kbits/s to avoid any audio dropouts or glitches. Also, aptX Lossless is not a new Bluetooth codec; instead, it is just a new standard of Qualcomm’s highly scalable Bluetooth codec, offering variable bitrate, low system latency, and high data throughput.

“With many leading music streaming services now offering extensive lossless music libraries, and consumer demand for lossless audio growing, we’re pleased to announce this new support for CD lossless audio streaming for Bluetooth earbuds and headsets, which we plan to make available to customers later this year,” said James Chapman, vice president, and general manager of Qualcomm.