If you love music and live with your wireless headphones enjoying your favorite albums and artists wherever you are from your Android phone, we have good news for you from Qualcomm, which released the aptX and aptX HD codecs to make high quality audio more accessible to everyone.
To listen to music from your Android mobile to wireless headphones, a connection is made via Bluetooth, the codecs of these devices determining the sound quality. In other words, it will depend on both the Bluetooth codecs of the transmitter (the phone) and those of the receiver (the headset). As data transmission is wirelessthis transfer is optimized in terms of information flow, stability and battery consumption.
From there, your phone’s codecs are usually at least SBC (High Compression Low Quality Bluetooth Audio) and AAC (Better Quality Lossy Compression). From here, the more Bluetooth codecs included, the easier it is to opt for a high-quality sound experience (with matching headphones), for example with aptX and its variants or LDAC (High-Resolution Audio).
Qualcomm brings high-quality audio to Android
The problem with these codecs capable of offering high quality sound is that they have user licenses, that is, they you have to go through the box to implement them: This is the case of Sony’s LDAC or Qualcomm’s aptX. A few months ago, Android journalist Mishaal Rahman echoed on Reddit a patch from Qualcomm’s engineering team’s Android Open Source Project (AOSP) related to aptX codecs.
Since Android 8.0 Oreo, Bluetooth A2DP has included proprietary support for AAC, LDAC, and aptX HD, but manufacturers had to pay Qualcomm for its use. With this recent integration into AOSP, they are now part of APEX. Qualcomm’s response to Rahman confirmed this: Android manufacturers will no longer have to pay for the license to use aptX and aptx HDwhich are now part of the Apache AOSP license.
Concluding that not only the manufacturers, but also all developer building a custom ROM based on Android will be able to integrate Qualcomm’s aptX and aptX HD encoders at no cost, so hopefully we’ll see soon how the range of phones is expanding with these high-end quality sound features. Among them, brands like Samsung or Honor, so far reluctant to set it up.
But all that glitters is not gold: Qualcomm details that what has been released are the encoders, so those implementing it will still have to pay for the use of other aspects of aptX, such as the decoder and the use of those.
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