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Comment by Goosey | Hacker News Reader

  10. Android 13 adopts Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, a new Bluetooth audio standard that results in lower latency than classic audio. This allows you to hear audio that’s in better sync with the sound’s source, reducing delay. With Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, you can also enjoy enhanced audio quality and broadcast audio to multiple devices at the same time.

This is huge! Now I wonder if I have any Bluetooth devices which support the new standard, or if I will be forced to buy new headphones (again!)

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This happens to be my area of expertise (somewhat). You don't and none are planned to be released until later this year.

You likely don't even have a phone that supports it: Only high-end chipsets with Bluetooth 5.2 capability support it (check for an explicit mention of LE Audio in the SoC's data sheet; per my understanding the isochronous channels needed for LE Audio are optional in the standard).

Oh yeah, and it is huge, mostly in one way I care about: The audio quality might not suck so badly anymore when making phone calls because the standard finally allows more than 16kHz audio recording (the need for an extra profile has been removed).

According to the Bluetooth SIG cert for the new Galaxy Buds2 Pro, they support LC3 and many of the relevant LE Audio profiles.

https://launchstudio.bluetooth.com/ListingDetails/154534

There's also this Bluetooth transmitter called the NEXUM VOCE that supports LE Audio, including Broadcast Audio:

https://launchstudio.bluetooth.com/ListingDetails/157814

Hey, nice, new releases! There's a chance that many devices are in the pipeline and have been held back until now with Android 13 just being released and the LE Audio spec just being finished/the marketing push just starting (it might be hard to believe how long I've had to search for basic information beyond years-old regurgitated press releases a few months ago).

For everyone playing along at home: Look out for "Basic Audio Profile" support.

Do you know what Samsung Galaxy phones do differently that lets them broadcast audio to multiple ordinary headsets?

I don't know exactly, but my educated guess is that they form multiple normal Bluetooth audio connections to multiple devices. The standard allows this and the bandwidth should be fine too, so I suppose they just added a little bit of software to control it.

I don't know specifically what Samsung does, but a lot of OEMs who offer similar features licensed tech from a company called Tempow. Tempow offered its own BT stack and profile called Tempow Audio Profile (TAP) that enabled streaming audio to multiple Bluetooth audio outputs simultaneously. Motorola and TCL deployed phones with this tech.

BTW, Google acquired Tempow last year: https://www.protocol.com/entertainment/google-synaptics-temp...

Its BS. The low latency part doesnt come from LE, but from adopting yet another proprietary blob Audio codec. Instead of standardizing on OPUS they went with LC3. 20 more years of royalties for fraunhofer.

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