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 is great, but simply stating that the encoder is “open source” is quite misleading (while technically correct). The codec is owned by Sony and heavily licensed. It’s a savvy business move of Sony to make the encoder free to use though, so everyone else can support their standard while charging manufacturers who want to integrate it into their headphones.
If we want a really free and open high quality codec, we should push for opus support via bluetooth
Yes… I made double sure to mention ‘encoder’ between that.
Xiph really won the lossy codec scene with Opus and I transcoded all my junk to that format. Hitting (my personal) transparency on 128k vbr is flat out impressive and it warms my heart that corpos won’t have a reason to collect taxes for basic things like audio codec. However it’s a different story with bluetooth audio codec in which I hope will change.