aptX HD dongle?

thewanted · 18 Jul 2018 at 06:58

Hey,

I'm trying to find a small USB dongle that supports aptX HD. Something like this would be perfect, but it only supports aptX and not aptX HD.

I haven't been able to find one yet. Does it exist?

Marsman · 18 Jul 2018 at 11:00

Haven't seen one, just those little box/puck receiver/transmitters.

thewanted · 18 Jul 2018 at 11:02

Marsman said:
Haven't seen one, just those little box/puck receiver/transmitters.

Yeah, me too

I can't find an LDAC-compatible dongle either, meh.

IvanDobskey · 18 Jul 2018 at 11:46

Don't Avantree make one?

thewanted · 18 Jul 2018 at 11:52

IvanDobskey said:
Don't Avantree make one?

They only make a "puck" that supports aptx HD - link

I've been listening to my new Sony WH-1000XM2 headphones through my Dell Latitude 7480 laptop and it sounds pretty good so perhaps a dongle isn't required. I wish I could tell which Bluetooth codec the laptop is using though.

jpaul · 18 Jul 2018 at 12:12

looking for a solution myself -
Have you considered aac codec rather than apt-x, if your headphones support that, these can do 250Kb/s over blue-tooth and can potentially send the original bitstream, so it does not get decoded and then re-encoded as apt-x.

[ moving into the wireless domain, rather than BT, DNLA dongles (eg audiocast m5) will do lossless transfer, but then need to use its dac(&need power supply)
better than chromecast audio, if your device does not support that. ]

thewanted · 19 Jul 2018 at 07:30

jpaul said:
Have you considered aac codec rather than apt-x

I hadn't, thanks! My headphones do support AAC and it looks like it's a lot easier to find an AAC Bluetooth dongle than an aptX HD one!

It's very annoying that Windows 10 doesn't tell you which Bluetooth codec it's using because it may well be using AAC, but I suspect that it's probably using SBC.

Monkeynut · 21 Jul 2018 at 18:10

Word of note though is that AAC like SBC has pretty poor latency which is where AptX excels. It's a shame Opus audi didn't come out sooner so devices would support it as it's royalty free.

jpaul · 22 Jul 2018 at 15:24

Monkeynut said:
Word of note though is that AAC like SBC has pretty poor latency which is where AptX excels. It's a shame Opus

yes opus (per utube) seems a good codec.
.. but re: latency (if it matters for your situation), isn't aac as low as apt-x, if you have the right player on your device that is sending the aac codec directly (bitstream style) ?

Many android phones will go through a common sound mixer, so will re-encode, from a common 48khz sample rate ... so that is degrading the sound too.

Monkeynut · 22 Jul 2018 at 21:26

jpaul said:
yes opus (per utube) seems a good codec.
.. but re: latency (if it matters for your situation), isn't aac as low as apt-x, if you have the right player on your device that is sending the aac codec directly (bitstream style) ?

Many android phones will go through a common sound mixer, so will re-encode, from a common 48khz sample rate ... so that is degrading the sound too.

If I remember correctly the Ogg guys seem to think AAC has a ~200ms latency which would be apparent if you were running through the system mixer. If you were passing directly I would assume not but wouldn't know.