Many lossless codecs are lossy codecs + residual encoders. For example FLAC has predictor(lossy codec) + residual.
It’s loss-less, not loss-none
Dang it, was going to make this same joke lol
It’s a good joke
We really need someone other than Qualcomm & Apple to come up with lossless Bluetooth audio codecs.
TBF the whole Bluetooth audio situation is a complete mess
Opus! It’s a merge of a codec designed for speech (from Skype!) with one designed for high quality audio by Xiph (same people who made OGG/Vorbis).
Although it needs some more work on latency, it prefers to work on bigger frames but default than Bluetooth packets likes, but I’ve seen there’s work on standardizing a version that fits Bluetooth. Google even has it implemented now on Pixel devices.
Fully free codec!
opus isn’t lossless
Nobody needs lossless over Bluetooth
Edit: plenty of downvotes by people who have never listened to ABX tests with high quality lossy compare versus lossless
At high bitrate lossy you literally can’t distinguish it. There’s math to prove it;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem
At 44 kHz 16 bit with over 192 Kbps with good encoders your ear literally can’t physically discern the difference
Nobody “needs” to listen to music over Bluetooth at all, but why not make it sound like it’s supposed to?
Why use lossless for that when transparent lossy compression already does that with so much less bandwidth?
Opus is indistinguishable from lossless at 192 Kbps. Lossless needs roughly 800 - 1400 Kbps. That’s a savings of between 4x - 7x with the exact same quality.
Your wireless antenna often draws more energy in proportion to bandwidth use than the decoder chip does, so using high quality lossy even gives you better battery life, on top of also being more tolerant to radio noise (easier to add error correction) and having better latency (less time needed to send each audio packet). And you can even get better range with equivalent radio chips due to needing less bandwidth!
You only need lossless for editing or as a source for transcoding, there’s no need for it when just listening to media
This has strong “nobody needs a monitor over 120Hz because the human eye can’t see it” logic. Transparency is completely subjective and people have different perceptions and sensitivities to audio and video compression artifacts. The quality of the hardware playing it back is also going to make a difference, and different setups are going to have a different ceiling for what can be heard.
The vast majority of people are genuinely going to hear zero difference between even 320kbps and a FLAC but that doesn’t mean there actually is zero difference, you’re still losing audio data. Even going from a 24-bit to a 16-bit FLAC can have a perceptible difference.
The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem isn’t subjective, it’s physics.
Your example isn’t great because it’s about misconceptions about the eye, not about physical limits. The physical limits for transparency are real and absolute, not subjective. The eye can perceive quick flashes of objects that takes less than a thousandth of a second. The reason we rarely go above 120 Hz for monitors (other than cost) is because differences in continous movement barely can be perceived so it’s rarely worth it.
We know where the upper limits for perception are. The difference typically lies in the encoder / decoder or physical setup, not the information a good codec is able to embedd with that bitrate.
As unfortunate as the naming misdirection is, I have to say: LDAC sounds significantly better (to me) than other Bluetooth codecs I have tried. It also works on Linux and android with no issues whatsoever. Open source is good.
I use it with a pair of Sony XM5’s, which can also be used in wired mode, so you kind of get the best of both worlds.
I highly doubt that. Do a proper ABx test (such as the one on digitalfeed.xyz) I have yet to meet someone who can pass the tests with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
at high signal strength LDAC should default to 990kbps… which is kind of ridiculous since it’s so high it’s higher than some lossless codecs, like uncompressed 16-bit 48kHz. (which is higher than standard CD quality)
Uncompressed 16 bit 48KHz stereo is 1536 kbps, which is just slightly higher than what bluetooth 5 is capable of.
Oh I forgot about stereo, ha.
Does this meme format / cat have a name? I was trying to find the raw version the other day and could not.
“Cat looks inside”
> knowyourmeme link
> look inside
> cat
To my knowledge it’s lossless in CD quality only, in high-res modes it becomes lossy
It’s nearly lossess if you can connect and maintain a 990kbps connection, but it still doesn’t have enough bandwidth to do it truly lossless. I think it would require 1411kpbs to be actually lossless. It is still better than any codec I know of for bluetooth as far as that does, but bluetooth just kinda sucks for that sort of application.
1411 kbps before compression. FLACs can go as low as 200 kbps based on the content of a file
Interesting. If that is so, then I am surprised that neither actually support actual lossless at that res without blowing up the noise floor.
Ah, misleading use of terminology that indicates one thing, but will win in court even if it actually means, or can later be said to mean, another.
I hope those involved in helping companies win these lawsuits choke on bones from food sold as boneless. Because that won a court case after “boneless” was redefined as a cooking method.
I don’t want them to choke to death. Just a little lesson, you know?
I work in pro AV and so many companies do this. Wow, you say LOSSLESS video on a valens chip? Oh, you’ve never actually done a side-by-side conparison, have you…
Extron differentiates between lossless and “visually lossless” which I appreciate.
“On 17 September 2019, the Japan Audio Society (JAS) certified LDAC with their Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification.”
Something something oxymoron. Bluetooth is trash, its why I still use wired whenever I can.
Ignorant of the subject matter, but I ripped a bunch of CDs to FLAC some time ago. Would that not work for this purpose?
The Sound Guys do a good job of breaking down LDAC, however the main point of criticism I have about the article is that they say that LDAC isn’t great because most smartphones don’t auto-choose the highest 990 bitrate. That doesn’t seem like an LDAC problem, that seems like a phone problem. My phone is admittedly a Sony, but it always chooses the highest bitrate first. There’s even a setting to force it to use 990.
The other criticism I have is that the sound guys kind of overlook the fact that, when your phone is in your pocket, it’s close enough to the headphones that you’ll almost always get the 990 bitrate. And the sound quality at 990 is fantastic. I cannot tell a difference between it and a wired connection for CD-quality FLACs. Even the 660 stepdown bitrate of the LDAC codec is really good.
