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A comment on AirPods Pro. Parent comment

Re:AirPods Pro by peatmoss on Monday October 28, 2019 @01:12PM (#21379024)
What’s the max bitrate for recent bluetooth standards? I hate the idea of layering compression on top of compression. I just haven’t found anything that compares to a modest pair of cans with any kind of okay DAC/amplifier.
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Re:AirPods Pro by Marsymars on Monday October 28, 2019 @01:38PM (#21379377)
aptX HD and LDAC are good, with bitrates of 576 kbps/990 kbps. The bigger problem with sound quality is that for any given price tier, adding Bluetooth comes with a significant compromise in SQ versus offerings that are optimized for only SQ.

Bluetooth also caps out at roughly the midrange for headphones. High-end bluetooth Bluetooth headphones are technically possible, but nobody makes anything equivalent to say, the Focal Clear, but with Bluetooth.

At home I use the Sennheiser RS 185, Sennheiser's top-end RF (non-Bluetooth) wireless headphones. I love them, but realistically, the sound quality is on par with $200 wired headphones.

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Re:AirPods Pro by jean23 on Monday October 28, 2019 @01:29PM (#21379251)
Bitrate isn't the problem. Modern codecs like Opus achieve transparency at around 100-120 kbit/s. Even uncompressed CD audio (at 1.411 kbit/s) could be streamed over Bluetooth 5 Low Energy – just (about 1.6 Mbit/s usable).
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