How do I get the best sound from Bluetooth headphones?

One of the most popular uses for Bluetooth is driving wireless headphones. Actually, “popular” might not be the right word: many reluctantly switched to Bluetooth headphones because their phone no longer has a traditional wired headphone adapter.

However, Bluetooth was designed for phone calls, and the creators were more worried about efficiency than sound. Accordingly, they chose an audio standard that required only lightweight encoding to provide comprehensible speech at low bit rates. This is the SubBand Codec—SBC for short— and it remains the baseline format for Bluetooth devices.

SBC isn’t useless, but it can sound mushy compared to an uncompressed source. It also suffers from latency as high as a quarter of a second, so it’s not suitable for real-time gaming, and won’t sync up properly with video content unless the host device adds a compensating delay.

The good news is that you’re not stuck with SBC. Bluetooth allows you to use any audio-streaming codec that’s supported by both the host and device, although there’s no standardization, so your options depend on the hardware you’re using.

For Apple devices, the alternative is AAC, the same compression format used by downloads from Apple Music. iPhones and AirPods use this by default, and although some quality is lost by re-encoding and re-decoding the music, the sound is better than SBC. However, AAC support on Android is patchy, making AirPods potentially risky for non-Apple users.

Android fans might be better off looking for aptX, a codec that’s similar to SBC, but delivers higher audio quality and lower latency. The HD variant promises “near lossless” sound, with bit rates up to 576Kbits/sec. The only problem is that these codecs are proprietary to semiconductor manufacturer

Qualcomm, so you can only switch to aptX if both your phone and headphones use Qualcomm Bluetooth chips.

Another alternative is LDAC. Unlike aptX, this is open source, and supported by all modern Android devices. The downside is that having been developed by Sony, it’s mostly supported by Sony headphones.

If all these codecs confuse you, better times are on the way. The LE Audio profile, introduced in Bluetooth 5.2, includes a default codec called LC3. This is a big improvement on SBC: the Bluetooth SIG claims that in its own tests, listeners found LC3 almost indistinguishable from the source material, even at lower bit rates than

SBC. Since it’s a part of the core Bluetooth standard,

LC3 should be supported by future devices.

For now, if you want to see which codecs your Android phone supports, you can do so from the “Developer options” page in the Settings app. This is hidden by default—to make it visible, open the “About phone” page, and tap on “Build number”. Once you’re in the developer options, you should find an option entitled “Bluetooth audio codec”, which will bring up a menu from which you can browse audio formats. Be warned, though: if you connect a pair of headphones or a speaker that don’t support your chosen codec, they’ll likely fall back to SBC.