Most of the core activities for which consumers use their handsets, from making calls to watching videos, involve audio. And a growing portion of that audio is being transmitted wirelessly to devices such as cordless headsets as more handset makers forgo the traditional headphone jack.

Today, Qualcomm Inc. introduced software called aptX Adaptive that it claims can make the wireless listening experience smoother while saving bandwidth.

The offering is an evolution of the company’s aptX codec, one of the means by which it makes money from its position as the leading supplier of networking chips for handsets. A sizable portion of the world’s Android devices rely on the technology for wireless audio streaming. Qualcomm has been licensing aptX to hardware makers in two flavors: a standard edition and an “HD” version capable of transmitting sound at higher quality.

According to the chipmaker, aptX Adaptive essentially combines the two editions’ capabilities in a single package. The codec can assess the strength of a wireless connection and automatically turn sound quality up or down to optimize the experience.

If a user is listening to a podcast in a hotel lobby saturated with wireless signals from other devices, aptX Adaptive will compress the audio to offset the weaker connectivity. It can reduce streams to as little as 280 kilobits per second, considerably less than the bitrate of the original standard edition of aptX.

On the other end of the spectrum, aptX Adaptive is capable of transmitting audio with a bitrate as high as 420 kilobits per second. That’s below the 576 provided by the HD edition of the original codec. However, a Qualcomm representative told The Verge that recent advances in audio compression enable aptX Adaptive to provide the same audio quality using less bandwidth.

The codec can set a stream’s bitrate to any level in the supported kilobyte range so to match connectivity conditions. Moreover, aptX Adaptive optimizes latency levels to different applications. A podcast, for instance, is less sensitive to networking delays than videos that have to keep the sound perfectly synced with the visuals.

Qualcomm expects aptX Adaptive to become available in Android devices during the first half of 2019.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons