iOS 7 Improves Bluetooth Audio Sound

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

One reason people like our friend Ben are willing to spend hours hacking together an Apple Airplay system for the car is that wireless Bluetooth audio connections are pretty lossy. Typically, Bluetooth maxes out at 128 Kbps, so even if you store (or stream) your music at a higher quality, it’ll sound like it was broadcast from 1999.

According to an unlinkable Stereophile magazine report, another thing iOS 7 does for music fans is increase the maximum back to 256 Kbps, which is twice as un-lossy as 128 Kbps, and according to many (including Apple, which uses this bitrate for iTunes Match), sounds pretty indistinguishable from CD quality.

If you’ve been considering switching to Bluetooth headphones to stop your headphone cord from snagging on everything, or have had your eye on a Jambox or something like it, but shied away due to audio quality, you now have one less reason for skepticism.

According to the same report, if you stream music from a Mac laptop to stereo Bluetooth headphones or a wireless speaker system, you can now crank the audio quality all the way up to CD quality, due to its new compatibility with aptX.

(via unlinkable, offline-only, unreadable-by-most-people Stereophile article, via David Hyman)