The recent release of latest Bluetooth® LE Audio  standards are a milestone for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group’s (SIG’s) and its members and will lay the foundation for the next generation of wireless audio innovation.

“Our members overcame the many challenges placed on them these past few years to complete the largest specification development project in the history of the Bluetooth SIG,” commented Mark Powell, CEO of the Bluetooth SIG. 

As SIG members and Bluetooth® connectivity experts, Qualcomm Technologies International, Inc. helped address the challenges and define the new LE Audio specification. One such engineer is Chris Church who has been involved for more than ten years. He has an up-close perspective on how the technology works and the exciting new use cases it will enable — so we sat down with him to learn exactly how this next-generation technology will change the world.

How long has LE Audio been in the works with the Bluetooth SIG?

I first became aware of the desire to run audio over Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) at a meeting in September 2012. What we have now looks nearly nothing like the early projections for Bluetooth® LE at the time. The initial thoughts of the hearing aid companies that were championing the work was low bitrate audio for hearing impaired users, without high fidelity requirements. As the debates continued and some other interesting use cases and requirements began to evolve, other ecosystems, like consumer audio, became more interested, and a decision was made to rearchitect the entire audio stack to incorporate high-quality audio and everything in between.  

Why is LE Audio relevant now?

LE Audio has encompassed almost 20 years of learning in the wireless audio space and will simplify participation for non-technical people who just want to be able to tune in to things as they become available without worrying about complicated set ups. Wireless earbuds have been so phenomenally popular, the LE Audio project arrived at just the right time to serve the needs of so many different demographics.

LE Audio has built in all of that learning, with a view of creating something that will not only do everything we wanted to do for the last 20 years, but also handle just about everything we can think of for the next 20 years. The only limits to LE Audio are in the imagination of developers.

When did you become involved in the LE Audio specifications? What was your biggest impact to the final specification?

My own contributions around LE audio were pretty limited initially — for the first few years I was pretty busy with other things as the chair of several working groups in the SIG, but that changed in 2019. My boss caved into my requests to let me redraw the existing LE Audio protocols using the well-established GATT architecture. We’d been running into some showstopping issues around how to define the way to do things and I had an inkling we could write it all in a way where everyone would understand what we were doing in enough detail that we could really start to argue over how to do it properly.

As things progressed, I assumed the editor role for the rewrite of the Basic Audio Profile and created the associated Audio Stream Control Service to handle all of the functions of the Audio Stream Control Protocol, as well as the all-new Broadcast Audio Scan Service specifications.

As a user, what is the LE Audio feature you are most excited about?

For me, it’s Auracast™ broadcast audio. It uses the same new stack and specs as regular unicast, but the number of listeners isn’t limited by the radio bandwidth in the same manner; the source doesn’t need to connect to a load of different sinks. In broadcast audio, you can have one source (or many sources, all throwing out different stuff) and an unlimited number of devices can listen in.

This means that you can access audio from any Auracast™ transmitter device to hear a public audio broadcast. This makes it possible for you to hear an important announcement at the bus stop, post office, or airport gate announcement, individualize the television volume even when you’re watching with the entire family, talk to someone at the doorbell, seamlessly share music with a group of friends, or even listen to the receptionist at the doctor’s surgery. All of this can be as simple as scanning a QR code, then connecting to listen in. And it can be leveraged by a large range of people, from a venue with professionally installed equipment to a person in the street using a smartphone — it’s going to change lives.

What will be the most valuable changes to the world from the possibilities of LE Audio?

The size of the user base that can join in the conversation, especially hearing-impaired users, is going to snowball exponentially. Hearing loss cuts you off from the everyday social interactions with your community, your family, the sources of information and entertainment that others rely on to enhance their everyday lives. With LE Audio, that is all going to change as we enter a new era of technology that will send and receive audio using the same underlying features.

What’s next for Bluetooth Audio?

The architecture we’ve built allows new use cases to be added simply and in a fraction of the time the classic specifications might have taken — so now, it’s only a question of what people want to see next. I can’t be too specific as much of the upcoming work remains confidential... so be sure to watch this space and sign up for our newsletter below.

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