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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Everyone who wants a standard to require their patent is allergic to it, but Opus was designed for exactly this. It’s acoustically transparent at moderate bit rate, good enough at lower bit rate, and adds minimal latency.

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Bluetooth HFP 1.9 includes support for LC3 codec for Super Wideband Speech (SWB) in Handsfree mode [1], with 32kbps bitrate.

Quality is significantly better than SBC. ETSI has tested this extensively and came to the conclusion that LC3 is better than Opus in some common conditions [2]

Quote: LC3 at 32 kbps (LC3 32) provides significantly better audio quality than Opus-CELT at 32 kbps and complexity level 0 (OPUS_v114_c0 and COPUS_v114_c0)

So there IS a solution for higher quality, which is LC3-SWB. It's just that both devices need to support HFP 1.9 to make use of better codecs, which will take a while especially on the headset side.

[1] https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/hands-free-pr...

[2] https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_tr/103500_103599/103590/01...

Love that profits plunder progress.

It’s true.

The SBC bitrates discussed in the article are nuts. Opus is transparent at 1/5-1/4 of those rates. OTOH it’s newer and maybe ten-year-old cheap Bluetooth chips couldn’t have handled it.

What would the power requirements for decoding Opus with a low latency be? Wireless earphones have tiny batteries.

Also keep in mind that you would also need realtime transcoding on the transmitter, as the device would need to mix whatever audio-codec is provided with other channels (Notification sounds, etc.) and encode it into Opus on-the-fly.

No no no, capitalism is supposed to make BETTER products, because money! You must be mistaken.

Better than what?

Not sure what is a failing unique to capitalism here. The USSR had a standards body comparable to western ones (Gosstandard) and that still has plenty of political infighting and abuse. And for all of capitalism's failings, I don't think it's had any scientific failings on the level of Lysenkoism.

Capitalism isn't bad per se, however capitalism without any limitation can be quite dangerous for allowing too much power in the hands of too few entities.

Compared to what?

Capitalism with limitations.

How does the patent system follow from capitalism?

It lets people effectively own ideas, prevent others from using them, and potentially license the ideas out for money.

Free-market capitalism is based on competition and low barriers of entry. A government-granted monopoly such as patents is antithetical to capitalism.

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