By now, you probably know you won’t get the best sound quality from streaming over Bluetooth — it compresses the audio signal and, therefore, loses audio quality. This is why wireless headphones, earbuds or speakers that stream over Bluetooth don’t sound as good as their Wi-Fi-streaming counterparts.
And while the audio quality of Bluetooth streaming continues to not be great compared to Wi-Fi streaming or playing audio over a wired connection, it has gotten better thanks to advanced Bluetooth codecs that support higher-resolution bitrates.
A bitrate is the amount of data transmitted over a given time — in terms of Bluetooth streaming, bitrates are measured in kilobits per second (or kbps). The most common Bluetooth codec is Apple’s AAC, which has a max bitrate of 320kbps — a relatively low resolution by today’s standards.
That said, there are Bluetooth codecs that support higher bitrates, such as aptX Adaptive (up to 420 kbps), aptX HD (up to 576 kbps), LDAC (up to 990 kbps) and aptX Lossless (1,411 kbps), the latter of which is equivalent to CD’s audio quality.
And there are quite a few wireless headphones, earbuds and speakers that support these new codecs. But in order to take advantage of these higher-resolution Bluetooth codecs, you need to check a couple of boxes.
First, you need to stream a high-resolution track from a lossless service (such as Apple Music or Tidal). And second and third, the devices you’re streaming from and to both need to support the same higher-resolution Bluetooth codec.
