On the 7th of September 2016, technology giant Apple® announced the iPhone 7, and along with it something seemingly inconceivable to music lovers and tech-heads alike: the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack.
In a move that stunned the internet, people’s reactions to the news ranged from puzzled through to suspicious, and in some cases, just plain angry. For many music lovers, a world of great-sounding wireless Bluetooth audio seemed unimaginable.
Of course there are still plenty of wired options for your music, but today the real question remains: is Bluetooth audio as good as its wired counterpart?
Yes, it absolutely is – but certain factors need to be taken into account.
A matter of time
The first ever stereo Bluetooth headphones were released in 2004, and in a landscape dominated by Apple’s cool-affirming white wired earbuds, people may have dismissed the design, their eyebrows sceptically raised at the cans’ reliability and audio quality.
When it was first introduced, Bluetooth streamed music from your headphones to your device at 328kb/s – a rate that sits just under mp3 quality sound, and well below the standards of audio enthusiasts.
To enable this data to pass from one device to another, Bluetooth relies on SBC (low complexity subband coding) compression to ‘fit’ your music through the technology’s imaginary ‘thin pipes’ – once again, resulting in less detail heard in your music. This doesn’t sound great for true music lovers.
But as time progressed, so did Bluetooth.
In 2009, a technology called Qualcomm® aptX™ Bluetooth was introduced to consumer electronics. Using a different kind of compression, it allowed higher quality audio through the narrow Bluetooth bandwidth. aptX allows CD quality (16-bit/44.1kHz) audio streaming, a bitrate that fits more in line with the standards of us audio enthusiasts and music lovers.
However, numbers are just numbers. How do they ultimately convert to a meaningful listening experience?