It’s loss-less, not loss-none
Dang it, was going to make this same joke lol
It’s a good joke
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)
Uncompressed 16 bit 48KHz stereo is 1536 kbps, which is just slightly higher than what bluetooth 5 is capable of.
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.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.
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.
Do you mean abx.digitalfeed.net?
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.
Many lossless codecs are lossy codecs + residual encoders. For example FLAC has predictor(lossy codec) + residual.
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.
We really need someone other than Qualcomm & Apple to come up with lossless Bluetooth audio codecs.
TBF the whole Bluetooth audio situation is a complete mess
Bluetooth as a whole is kind of a mess if we’re being honest.
Can we name a more poorly implemented protocol? Probably. One used as much as Bluetooth? Probably not.
SMTP?
Isn’t LDAC made by sony?
Correct. Qualcomm makes aptX
Opus! It’s a merge of a codec designed for speech (from Skype!) with one designed for high quality audio by Xiph (same people who made OGG/Vorbis).
Although it needs some more work on latency, it prefers to work on bigger frames but default than Bluetooth packets likes, but I’ve seen there’s work on standardizing a version that fits Bluetooth. Google even has it implemented now on Pixel devices.
Fully free codec!
opus isn’t lossless
Nobody needs lossless over Bluetooth
Edit: plenty of downvotes by people who have never listened to ABX tests with high quality lossy compare versus lossless
At high bitrate lossy you literally can’t distinguish it. There’s math to prove it;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem
At 44 kHz 16 bit with over 192 Kbps with good encoders your ear literally can’t physically discern the difference
Nobody “needs” to listen to music over Bluetooth at all, but why not make it sound like it’s supposed to?
Why use lossless for that when transparent lossy compression already does that with so much less bandwidth?
Opus is indistinguishable from lossless at 192 Kbps. Lossless needs roughly 800 - 1400 Kbps. That’s a savings of between 4x - 7x with the exact same quality.
Your wireless antenna often draws more energy in proportion to bandwidth use than the decoder chip does, so using high quality lossy even gives you better battery life, on top of also being more tolerant to radio noise (easier to add error correction) and having better latency (less time needed to send each audio packet). And you can even get better range with equivalent radio chips due to needing less bandwidth!
You only need lossless for editing or as a source for transcoding, there’s no need for it when just listening to media
This has strong “nobody needs a monitor over 120Hz because the human eye can’t see it” logic. Transparency is completely subjective and people have different perceptions and sensitivities to audio and video compression artifacts. The quality of the hardware playing it back is also going to make a difference, and different setups are going to have a different ceiling for what can be heard.
The vast majority of people are genuinely going to hear zero difference between even 320kbps and a FLAC but that doesn’t mean there actually is zero difference, you’re still losing audio data. Even going from a 24-bit to a 16-bit FLAC can have a perceptible difference.
The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem isn’t subjective, it’s physics.
Your example isn’t great because it’s about misconceptions about the eye, not about physical limits. The physical limits for transparency are real and absolute, not subjective. The eye can perceive quick flashes of objects that takes less than a thousandth of a second. The reason we rarely go above 120 Hz for monitors (other than cost) is because differences in continous movement barely can be perceived so it’s rarely worth it.
We know where the upper limits for perception are. The difference typically lies in the encoder / decoder or physical setup, not the information a good codec is able to embedd with that bitrate.
is opus the one that allows high quality mic and headphone at the same time over Bluetooth?
That’s more than a codec question, that’s a Bluetooth audio profile question. Bluetooth LE Audio should support higher quality (including with Opus)
Could also stand for Lazy DumbAss Cat if the pic is any relation
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.
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
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
Does this meme format / cat have a name? I was trying to find the raw version the other day and could not.
“Cat looks inside”
Compression is lossy.
So when you zip some files and then unzip them, some of the bytes are missing? Really?!
It’s only the zeros, so you’re not really missing anything.
If nothing is lost, what did you compress away? Decompression is magic, I ain’t gotta explain shit
you compressed away redundant data, 1111111000000000011111111 -> (1x7)(0x10)(1x8)
If you want the magic explained, here’s a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch
Some compression is lossy
