For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8, so you can see just how long Windows is sleeping on this. I’m excited about the incoming next gen called LC3plus, my next pair is definitely gonna have that.
LDAC claims are completely bullshit.
LC3plus is worse than AAC quality wise (to be expected). Lower latency is the only thing going for it. And that’s just because AAC is a very high-latency codec. Opus (as a format) would win on both fronts, although there could be issues with creating a high-quality encoder for it that is not too complex, and power-efficient.
After testing LC3Plus, Opus, and AAC personally for bluetooth, LDAC claims are BS, but for the usecase for bluetooth, LC3Plus is more then sufficient, I don’t know why people keep quoting this post, under normal usecase, you get 3-6x the bitrate being tested, under which case all three codecs sound transparent with LC3Plus maybe dipping a little low. however latency is significantly better then AAC (tested against libfdk) and marginally better then opus
How did you test Opus for bluetooth?
In case you didn’t know, you can use 10ms (or even 5ms) frames with Opus instead of the default (20ms). 10ms should roughly match LC3plus’s default latency while still retaining high quality.
Pipewire currently supports opus for both ways 10ms is what I benched against and for testing you get a wackload of SBCs and Bluetooth chips and test that, 5ms frames were largely unusable. I wanted to take a look at the pinebuds, but it cost like 40 dollars in shipping or something retarded like that to canada, and im not gonna bother with that
I asked because I wasn’t aware of any consumer buds supporting Opus. I wasn’t aware of PineBuds, thank you for mentioning them.
if you want something else, google headphones support opus, but it uses their own headers and stuff so it’s not compatible with pipewire, only google phones IIRC