With the emergence of Bluetooth stereo music in today’s marketplace, the need to satisfy extreme audiophiles was a must. Currently, there is no comparison between the audio quality of high-end wired stereo headphones and Bluetooth stereo headphones. Wired headphones win hands down.

Open Interface North America (OINA), a leader in Bluetooth technology and premier provider of embedded Bluetooth solutions, claims to have closed or even eliminated this gap in audio quality. Today, OINA announced the release of SOUNDabout Lossless, which is a lossless codec, or in layman’s terms: a type of audio compression that allows the exact original audio to be reconstructed from the compressed audio. As a result, the audio quality is identical to the original source because it is an exact digital copy.

According to OINA, SOUNDabout Lossless offers “audiophile quality to Bluetooth wireless audio by delivering perfect reproduction of streaming audio over a Bluetooth radio link.” OINA’s Chief Technology Officer, Greg Burns, says “wireless stereo headphones, for example, can now have exactly the same performance as a wired headphone”.

How does it all work? OINA explains by highlighting 4 major factors:

• Perfect Reproduction: SOUNDabout Lossless uses a proprietary, patent-pending lossless compression technique that retains all of the audio information. A decompressed audio stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original.
• Low Latency: Low latency is critical for maintaining “lip-synch”; matching lip movements to the sound of the voice. When listening to audio on a movie or video clip, the audio should be no more than 40 milliseconds behind the video. SOUNDabout Lossless has an encoding latency under 10 milliseconds in all encoding modes, going as low as 2 milliseconds, allowing for highly accurate synchronization of sound and picture.
• Symmetric Low Complexity: SOUNDabout Lossless uses a highly efficient algorithm that requires only 20MIPS for either encode or decode. This high-performance enables real-time transcoding from other formats.
• State of the Art Compression Ratios: The compression achieved by lossless codecs depends greatly on the audio content. Some audio tracks can be compressed by only 30% while others can be compressed by 60% or more. Compression ratios for SOUNDabout Lossless are comparable with lossless codecs such as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), neither of which achieves low-latency.

If the sound quality that Bluetooth stereo audio provides can match the quality of wired headphones, then the state of Bluetooth technology as a whole will certainly get a tremendous boost.

Considering all variables to be equal, what would you choose; a pair of wired headphones or Bluetooth stereo headphones? I think I’ll cut the cord and go with the Bluetooth stereo headphones!

For more information, visit the Open Interace North America website.

Posted August 1, 2007 by BlueTomorrow.com Editorial Staff