My favorite is most people are listening to already lossy compressed music that gets decoded and then recompressed in another lossy manner… I miss my cable sometimes.
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.
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)
The bitrate is manually enforceable on Linux, too
*specifically using PipeWire
Pipewire or the pulseaduo Bluetooth codec add-on. The pipewire implementation seems to be mimicking the old pulseaudio plugin.
That’s assuming raw PCM data, no compression (lossy or lossless) whatsoever.
LDAC can do lossless redbook audio (16 bit 44.1 KHz) at 990kbps. All other modes are lossy.
It’s probably doing something much like FLAC- lossy encoder + residual corrections to ensure you get the original waveform back out, but with less bandwidth than raw PCM.Uncompressed 16 bit 48KHz stereo is 1536 kbps, which is just slightly higher than what bluetooth 5 is capable of.
I highly doubt that. Do a proper ABx test (such as the one on digitalfeed.net) I have yet to meet someone who can pass the tests with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
You highly doubt my personal experience?
Yes, because I have been an audio engineer for over two decades now. Show me someone who can reliably pass the iTunes test. Science does not care about your subjective personal experience.
Ok boomer
That would hurt my feelings if I wasn’t a millennial lmao.
Seriously, though, your failure to even attempt to have a discussion tells me you have the discipline/intellect of a 14 y/o Ipad kid who learns everything from chatgpt.
Do you mean abx.digitalfeed.net?
I don’t understand what’s funny. It’s developed with no competition, it’s open source, it’s definitely better than the current options out there and doesn’t cost money. Is it just audio snobs in here? I consider myself somewhat snobby re:audio but even I use wireless headphones. Some grade A snobbery in this thread. LDAC is great. You’re not convincing anyone to go back to wired headphones for day to day use
Ignorant of the subject matter, but I ripped a bunch of CDs to FLAC some time ago. Would that not work for this purpose?
Audio CDs contain 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM. If you got FLACs out you transcoded them, and transcoding from lossy to lossless is generally undesirable
EDIT: I stand corrected, I forgot that PCM is not a codec.
I’m pretty sure if you rip CDs directly to FLAC, it’s a perfect copy assuming you’re using good software. PCM isn’t lossy or lossless because it’s not a compressed format, it’s an uncompressed bitstream. Think of it like the original data. If it was burned to a CD as digital MP3 data and then ripped that to FLAC, then yes you’d be going from lossy compressed to lossless, which would hide the fact that quality was lost when it went to MP3 in the first place.
Just as an example, you can rip a CD directly to FLAC (you should also find and use the correct sample offset for your CD drive), rip the cue sheet for track alignment, then burn the FLAC back to a new CD using the cuesheet (and the correct write offset configuration), and you’ll get a CD with the exact bit for bit pattern of “pits” burned into the data layer.
You can then rip both CDs to a raw uncompressed wav file (wav is basically just a container for PCM data) and then you’ll be able to MD5sum both wav files and see that they are identical.
This is how I test my FLAC rips to make sure I’m preserving everything. This is also how CD checksum databases (like CDDB) work - people across the globe can rip to wav or flac and because it’s the same master of the CD, they’ll get identical checksums, and even after converting the PCM/wav into a flac you are still able to checksum and verify it’s identical bit for bit.
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
