Qualcomm wants to give gamers a nearly lag-free experience with its upcoming S3 Gen 2 Sound System that works on Bluetooth 5.4. The platform, announced today (June 23), promises a latency of less than 20ms which is significantly lower than the 100ms latency of Bluetooth 5.3.
The S3 Gen 2 Sound platform is based on Qualcomm’s work with aptX Low Lantecy, a codec that delivers sound with a delay of just 40ms. The S3 Gen 2 platform will cut that time in half. Why would you want a faster connection via Bluetooth? Well, for gamers, it’s all about hearing your teammates in real time, which is very important for games like Call of Duty Mobile.
There are of course some caveats to this.
First, you will need a smartphone or tablet with a Qualcomm chip with Bluetooth 5.4. Typically, you can find Snapdragon chips in Asus, Honor, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Sony, Xiaomi, and ZTE phones, as well as Samsung Galaxy flagship phones like the Samsung Galaxy S23 and Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. As for Bluetooth 5.4, it is almost non-existent in the wild yet because it only became available in March for manufacturers.
High quality audio streaming is also coming
It’s just a bottom note of today’s announcement, but Snapdragon says the S3 Gen 2 Sound Platform will support 24-bit 96kHz Bluetooth HD streaming with aptX Adaptive codec.
On the surface, it’s roughly comparable to CD quality – but remember that aptX Adaptive still compresses audio to around 352kbps so it can fit through a Bluetooth pipeline. It’s a big gain over the standard Bluetooth audio codec, SBC, but it’s not true High-Resolution Audio.
The final bit of the announcement is the inclusion of new Bluetooth LE features such as Auracast streaming capabilities for dongles and adapters that allow for location-based listening. This would be great if you want to listen to play commentary on a soccer game while you’re on the field or need help listening to the stage when you’re at an outdoor concert.
As for when we’ll start seeing devices equipped with the S3 Gen 2 Sound platform, Qualcomm hasn’t announced anything yet, but hopefully we’ll start seeing some at CES 2024 in January and soon after at MWC 2024 next February. year.
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