Stefan Mileschin

Yesterday the Bluetooth SIG has announced and released the newest Bluetooth standard for audio playback: LE Audio. The new standard is a complete new redesign of the audio stack, building upon the years of learnings that we’ve seen with Bluetooth audio in the past. The new LE Audio standard expends the flexibility and functionality of audio playback over Bluetooth, and is said to represent the new baseline for future developments over the next decade.

Traditional audio playback should be a familiar matter with everybody in the industry as well as consumers. The existing audio stack has now been renamed to “Classic Audio”, and will continue to coexist alongside the new LE Audio standard.

So what does LE Audio bring? The most important aspect of the new standard is self-explanatory and divulged in its very name; it’s based on the new Bluetooth Low Energy radio as opposed to the Bluetooth Classic radio. As a reminder, LE radio is fundamentally different to the classic radio standard and significantly improves upon the power efficiency of transmissions.

LE Audio also brings a lot of new features and helps today’s TWS (True Wireless Stereo) use-cases that we’ve seen over the last few years. TWS audio products nowdays mostly rely on one earpiece receiving the data signal from the transmitter device, and then re-transmits this to its other channel sibling. This is quite inefficient as you might imagine, as you have to transmit from what is usually a very battery limited device. LE Audio now standardises multi-stream transmissions – the source device is the one who handles transmissions of multiple synchronized streams, so for example a smartphone will be able to transmit to both left and right earpieces in TWS products. It is said that the synchronisation here is in the tens of microseconds, allowing for seamless and transparent playback.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15349...or-next-decade