Bluetooth stereo is stuck. It's appalling. You'd think that the idea of getting rid of twisting, strangling, knotting headphone cables would be a no-brainer. I can't count how many people I've seen nearly garroted by their headphone cords on the New York City subway. But while Bluetooth successfully put paid to the wired voice headset, for music it just can't close the deal.
The technology has two main problems: battery life and audio quality.
Battery life is the stickier one. I'm not actually thinking about battery life on the headphones. Once you start talking over-the-ear headphones, there's room for a decently sized battery. Rather, continuously streaming Bluetooth can kill your phone's battery. And as smartphone screens get bigger and bigger, and as we use them more and more, we're drawing more power more often. This problem may not be solvable until we get a truly great new battery technology.
Sound quality is the solvable problem. For years I had a running argument with our audio expert Tim Gideon where I'd try to get him to review Bluetooth stereo devices, but he would refuse because they all sounded awful. He was and is right. While there are a few stereo headsets that create better sound either with post-processing or just by being attentive to quality—the Motorola S9-HD and Plantronics BackBeat series come to mind—Bluetooth stereo devices generally sound awful because they decompress digital data and then recompress it with the the low-complexity default SBC codec to send over the Bluetooth link.
This doesn't bother people who mostly listen to highly compressed music while walking down noisy streets, but it's definitely hindered the ability to build broadly compatible wireless headphones you'd want to use in your living room. Lousy sound quality has also hurt Bluetooth stereo adoption in cars.
A few years ago I'd also have added in cost as a gating factor, but I'm seeing an increasing number of people on the street with $200 Beats headphones. The premium headphone has become a mainstream item.
HTC's Shining Hope for Wireless Audio
So here's where I get to my shining hope. The Bluetooth sound quality problem has been solvable for years; device makers just need to use a lossless, or at least a better codec. Open Interface North America came and went. Kleer never got any traction in phones. The higher-quality alternative codec aptX has been slugging it out for years without much success—until now.
At a recent meeting with HTC the company showed me its new Car StereoClip, which is a little aptX-compatible dongle that plugs into any car or home stereo to transmit perfect, uncompressed audio over Bluetooth from your phone.
HTC's new One series phones support aptX, which means that when paired with another aptX device—like the clip—they're going to have much better wireless sound quality.
HTC also has another advantage: it's a major investor in Beats. If Beats leads the way by putting aptX into its headphones, it could finally break the logjam and deliver wireless audio whose quality finally matches a good pair of wired headphones. (Yes, the aptX powered Sennheiser PX-210s are also out there, but they're two years old and don't have the market-moving brand power of Beats.)
So can we finally ditch the headphone cables? A lot of subway riders might be happier.
