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Comment by keeperofdakeys | Hacker News Reader

Bluetooth audio itself uses digital compression to keep the bandwidth low, and has a whole bunch of optional codecs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Adv...). Your Kenwood may not support the higher quality codecs, meaning it would sound worse than a comparable headphone jack aux cable.

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Even the best codecs used for BT audio are lossy, aren't they? So wouldn't an aux or lightning connection always sound better?

I think that's the point he's making.

I don't think it is? He said:

> Your Kenwood may not support the higher quality codecs, meaning it would sound worse than a comparable headphone jack aux cable.

That implies there's BT audio codecs that sound the same (or I guess better, but I think he/she probably meant "same") as an aux cable. I was saying I don't think that's true, that even the best BT audio codecs are (noticeably) inferior to in-phone-DAC-to-analog connections.

Sorry yeah missed out on the "best" audio codecs part of your predicate, as if to say "the ceiling is lower than you think" - sorry

It's a shame that Bluetooth can't do something like a stream copy. Quality could be better if your phone could pass the raw mp3/vorbis/opus stream over BT. Even with HQ codes like aptX it's pretty silly to be converting 256k mp3 to aptX at similar or higher bitrate.

Isn't that Bluetooth file transfer? Good idea but I guess the idea of a streaming protocol is it addresses realtime concerns in an unreliable medium. Imho that's the kind of thing analogue coding schemes are better at.

If it can output 320kbps MP3 or equivalent, nobody's gonna notice unless you tell them.

Of course this is correct if you being with a lossless file, but if you start with an already lossy file, despite it being possible to sound the same as a lossless file, when you re-encode it with a different encoding, for example ogg -> mp3, you'll lose different parts of the file in the compression algorithm, so it will end up sounding worse.

I can't say I know how the different bluetooth audio codecs work of course.

Just because it's lossy doesn't mean it can't sound good, but sure aux and lightning are probably better choices if you're concerned about it sounding good.

The huge audio difference described above is atypical from my experience, so I'd blame the stereo's bluetooth support before bluetooth audio itself.

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