A Conundrum of Bluetooth Codecs

[hal55]

I thought Bluetooth codecs could be summed up in just a few sentences, and went something like "SBC bad, AAC not much better, Aptx good, Sony LDAC best".
The more I get into it the more confusing and less clear cut it gets. To back up a bit, I will soon have a AKG N70NC bluetooth, noise cancelling headphone as part of a Samsung phone promotion, a model that has received a lot of flack for only having SBC and AAC codecs. If i interpret everything right, AAC would be fine if the music files had a data stream of less than about 300kb/second, but my uncompressed Flac music library usually plays at double this or more, which I assume means the tablet will start compressing everything to send over the Bluetooth link. I can of course use the wired connection, and probably will most of the time, but the convenience of just using the headphones wirelessly is pretty appealing, especially if there's a cat wanting to sit on my lap at the same time.
To confuse things more, I've enabled developer options in the Samsung tablet which allow some customizing of the installed codecs, including data rates, but I can't play with them till I get the headphones and the tablet pairs up.
So, can I ask, is AAC really only for low data rate applications, like Spotify, YouTube etc, and, if I use it to stream regular Redbook CD music files, will it degrade them and by roughly how much?
Thanks in advance,

[struth]

I use bluetooth a lot with my cans... my Nuras are hd aptx and my sonys do ldac as well.. rates for every version here

Codecs and Bitrates Comparison

AAC: 250 kbps
SBC: 328 kbps
aptX: 352 kbps
aptX HD: 576 kbps
LDAC: 990 kbps

Ldac comes out best but aptx hd isnt far behind sound wise. I have used aac on something; might have been my old iphone and tbh it was fine but not as good.. ldac is pretty much close as damn it flac level imo... needs a good transmitter tho they are available on most modern android phones. ive a sony phone so its part parcel in there. if you can get aptx hd you will be happy enough tho

[hal55]

Thanks for that, looking forward to getting them late August and trying them out. o

[hal55]

Interestingly I sent a query to AKG asking if the revised CM2 version of this headphone had better codec support and this was the answer
Reply from AKG over codec issue. "Latency is a tradeoff with robustness for Bluetooth connections. If you accept more latency, you will gain a more robust connection, and that is why we have done it the way we have.

BT is in itself a limitation on signal quality, and it was decided that audio quality would not be much better with other systems. Real high-resolution sound is possible only over cable, from a hi-res player, and this is an option on N700NC."

Ok, I'll be very interested to see how it goes off my headphone/dac combinations. Hoping it's really good, but I'm still a bit annoyed that you can't use this to wirelessly watch late night tennis and cricket (next test starts in a few hours) without latency issues.

[hal55]

Interestingly I sent a query to AKG asking if the revised CM2 version of this headphone had better codec support and this was the answer
Reply from AKG over codec issue. "Latency is a tradeoff with robustness for Bluetooth connections. If you accept more latency, you will gain a more robust connection, and that is why we have done it the way we have.

BT is in itself a limitation on signal quality, and it was decided that audio quality would not be much better with other systems. Real high-resolution sound is possible only over cable, from a hi-res player, and this is an option on N700NC."

Ok, I'll be very interested to see how it goes off my headphone/dac combinations. Hoping it's really good, but I'm still a bit annoyed that you can't use this to wirelessly watch late night tennis and cricket (next test starts in a few hours) without latency issues.

[struth]

latency shouldnt be an issue tbh if they did their job right. Robustness my arse. I can take my Nuras upstairs and they still play fine on apex hd. can even go out back a bit. Im awaiting the new Nuras arrival. they are mini headphones.. both are learning tho and adapt to your hearing through an app on phone initially for set up. They are expensive but work fantastically well. especially if your getting older as your hearing does change.
I might add Nura are Aussie company I think so might be cheaper over there

[hal55]

And just to finish off, the headphones turned up last Friday and, hilariously, needed to have Developer Options enabled on the phone it was packaged with enabled, and hidden settings amended otherwise volume was cripplingly low. Once enabled, it sounds brilliant. Next surprise was hooking it up to my external Dac/headphone amp and hearing the already impressive quality go through the roof. Beautiful set of cans indeed, better than my Audio Technica AD900s, admittedly now getting rather old, and on a par but different to Hifiman 400s. Very impressed by AKG.
(And that was an incredible cricket match last night, unbelievable that England pulled off the win)