Bluetooth.....it's the future!

[icehockeyboy]

I bought a Logitech Bluetooth device recently, the one I said I might get in my T amp thread, and its a brilliant little device, especially at the reduced price of about £24 instead of £40!

I currently have it in the dining room set up, but am tempted to get another for the main kit, which leads me to a question........am I likely to lose quality by doing this? I would be mainly streaming Spotify direct from my iPad.

[Reffc]

As I understand it, Bluetooth has to decompress the digital signal from whatever source you're using then recompresses using a lossy format called SBC (sub band coding) plus is bandwidth limited and even the latest versions of Bluetooth and the associated coding/decoding have limited bandwidth for streaming from say radio sources.

Its not going to be high rez, high fidelity but you may get acceptable results for general listening/radio etc. There seems to be conflicting information on the net about bluetooth and various manufacturers make various claims about bandwidth and resolution, but BT 3.0 I thought was about the fastest version out there at around 53Mb/s. Not sure if that's not enough though for high fidelity audio broadcasts.

[icehockeyboy]

Cheers Paul!

I think I will just enjoy the novelty of it in the dining room then.

[Stratmangler]

Chord Electronics have been using Bluetooth connectivity with their DAC range for some years, with excellent results.
There's no problem transmitting 24/96 files to one of their DACs.

[Rothchild]

Chord Electronics have been using Bluetooth connectivity with their DAC range for some years, with excellent results.
There's no problem transmitting 24/96 files to one of their DACs.

That's pretty clever! 24/96 in uncompressed format will eat about 4.3mbps and it appears that the maximum symetrical bandwidth of Bluetooth <v3 is 768kbps. 16bit FLACS run between about 900 and 1100kbps.

Bluetooth v3 would do it, although interestingly Bluetooth 3 isn't really Bluetooth, it's just a handshaking protocol for a 802 wireless connection.

[Stratmangler]

That's pretty clever! 24/96 in uncompressed format will eat about 4.3mbps and it appears that the maximum symetrical bandwidth of Bluetooth <v3 is 768kbps. 16bit FLACS run between about 900 and 1100kbps.

Bluetooth v3 would do it, although interestingly Bluetooth 3 isn't really Bluetooth, it's just a handshaking protocol for a 802 wireless connection.

From what I understand of it they use A2DP, which goes back as far as Bluetooth 1.1 .

[Rothchild]

From what I understand of it they use A2DP, which goes back as far as Bluetooth 1.1 .

Looks like A2DP is protocol utilising a lossy codec though?

[Stratmangler]

Looks like A2DP is protocol utilising a lossy codec though?

Still sounds great off the Chord DAC, whatever format it's converting to.
The 24/96 stuff might well have be resampled by the PC doing the playing.
I can't really say, as it's not my DAC and not my PC.