Qualcomm's Snapdragon Sound promises optimised, seamless audio in handsets and devices

You don't have to be a stickler for audio purity and clarity to find general audio experiences a little wanting at times - either the Bluetooth handset is a touch slower at syncing, or there's the odd lost data packet, and perhaps it's a pain to move from one source to another. Qualcomm wants to fix that.

Today, Qualcomm announced Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound, a combination of efforts that bring "seamless, immersive audio in, and across, devices including smartphones, wireless earbuds and headsets". Qualcomm hopes to reduce the instances of low sound quality, choppy audio, out-of-sync sound, nonsense wireless audio pairing routines, and ineffective battery life use for audio with these technologies.

Snapdragon Sound offers 24-bit, 96kHz bit-rate for music (when streamed through a third-party Bluetooth headset), 32kHz for calls, and 89ms latency for audio synchronisation, so the benefits cut across just about every common sound scenario. Snapdragon Sound also offers smart speaker amplification and its proprietary Qualcomm Aqstic audio codec, supporting up to 384kHz 32-bit PCM and DSD formats.

Many necessary technologies go into creating Snapdragon Sound, with one of the core components being a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8-series chipset - so, this is likely a flagship-grade-only tech. More importantly, it's an opt-in product that phone makers can get. Qualcomm is thrilled to share that Xiaomi and Audio-Technica are the first phone and audio brands to be its customers for Snapdragon Sound. Guess we'll see how good this is when it starts filtering down to consumers like ourselves.

Source: Qualcomm