... you'll not need only new phone, but new wireless headphones that have new DAC in them capable decoding the proprietary format.
Yet wired ones work with all these fancy high bit rates "out of the box"
True, but that's because wired ones don't need to do any meaningful computations. You just send the analog signal with as many channels as you need.
With wireless, you need to encode the sound, send it over the ether, receive it, decode it and play it back. All while having enough of a buffer not to have break ups in sound if there's a transient break in the signal.
That compute part is actually nasty, because you can't throw much power or cost at it. This needs to be integrated in phones and headphones that are often tiny. Just the audio delay alone associated with baseline SBC coding of bluetooth makes it all but useless for interactive content and requires adjusting of audio timing for synced multimedia content like video playback.
To get this working (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:To get this working (Score:2)
True, but that's because wired ones don't need to do any meaningful computations. You just send the analog signal with as many channels as you need.
With wireless, you need to encode the sound, send it over the ether, receive it, decode it and play it back. All while having enough of a buffer not to have break ups in sound if there's a transient break in the signal.
That compute part is actually nasty, because you can't throw much power or cost at it. This needs to be integrated in phones and headphones that are often tiny. Just the audio delay alone associated with baseline SBC coding of bluetooth makes it all but useless for interactive content and requires adjusting of audio timing for synced multimedia content like video playback.