In a constant race for better wireless connectivity, the Bluetooth standard seems to have won more than one battle so far as we now can benefit from its advantages not only with our mobile phones but with laptops, printers, portable music players, headphones and pretty much every somewhat important device in our everyday life. The Bluetooth is easy to work with, its power consumption is getting smaller by the time and the data transmission speed seems to grow - it's possible that the Bluetooth connectivity will be the one thing every piece of tech will finally embed sooner or later.

As far as sound transmission is concerned, the Bluetooth connectivity has one problem that derives from the small amount of data that can be sent or received over a defined period of time. This restriction has of course affected the quality of the Bluetooth streams between audio devices as the signal actually had to "flow" therefore the dimension of the "packets" obtained via compression had to be smaller and obviously a lot of compromise was made in this field.

Fortunately, it seems like these compromise days are over as one of the leaders in Bluetooth connectivity and gear development, Open Interface, announced yesterday (August 1st) that a new codec for the Bluetooth standard was perfected and released, offering seamless compression at lossless quality and the coded-decoded signal is bit-by-bit identical with the original source.

The SOUNDabout Lossless codec offers state of the art compression rates while at the same time providing audiophile-grade and incredibly low latency, around 2 ms. Even more, the new codec has smaller requirements as far as computing power is regarded and according to Open Interface, "SOUNDabout Lossless uses a highly efficient algorithm that requires only 20MIPS for either encode or decode. This high-performance enables real-time transcoding from other formats."

The SOUNDabout Lossless will be available for evaluation during the next few months and after this period of time, we'll see who gets the guts to embed it in mass-production, massively-selling gear...

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