New Bluetooth Audio

This post is way overdue. But it is only now that the new Bluetooth® audio technology - the LE Audio is finding its way into products. It has been 10 years in the making.

Internally LE Audio is super complex as it aims to propel wireless audio for the next 20 years (or more). My personal picks (in no particular order) of the features enabled by LE Audio are: 

• It uses the underlying Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) transport. Which not only means longer lasting earbuds, but most importantly Bluetooth-enabled hearing aid devices. It also means better behavior at higher packet loss - (longer range and dense/interfered environments).
• It introduces the new LC3 audio CODEC, which offers better perceived audio quality at half the data rate (compared to the old Bluetooth SBC) AND an order of magnitude better latency (down to 20-30ms range). Think about the impact of that on teleconferencing (and gaming of course).
• It natively supports multiple audio streams, so joint / shared experiences are now standardized across manufacturers / platforms / ecosystems.
• It supports broadcasts (including secured broadcasts), which on their own open an entirely new category for wireless audio.

Broadcast audio (branded Auracast) will be the most redefining feature of wireless audio.

Bluetooth broadcasting TV sets are the simplest use of the technology - multiple people can just join the stream. Bar / airport lounge scenarios are the most obvious ones, but even here you can have multiple audio streams, e.g., one for each supported language,

But the real strength of Auracast comes from the underlying security schemes, meaning the streams may be made selectively available to certain groups AND (most importantly) they can be selectively subscribed to. The practical use case is again - an airport - where selected announcements related to YOUR flight will break in your personal music or a phone conversation or a bar TV stream.

Similarly a hearing aid user may be tuned into the TV broadcast at home and a Bluetooth - enabled door bell will interrupt that stream offering the ability to chat with the person at the door.

With the plethora of technology options the big challenge now is for the UX designers. With the multitude of possible audio sources and individual priorities - the burden of organizing them is on the shoulders of platform devices / operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android).

And this is a real challenge. Laptops today have not figured out how to handle multiple apps using (each) a different combination of available audio devices (which can be dynamically plugged and unplugged). After using an iPhone for almost a year I still can't set the clock alarm volume separately from other volume settings. And despite phone apps knowing you've boarded a 10-hour flight, the phones' alarms still ring "in the middle" of the time-zone shifted night flight.

These will be very interesting developments to watch. Despite the advancements towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), properly managing audio options is still an issue which proves to be at least equally difficult to solve.