CSR pitches better sound quality, battery life in Bluetooth headsets

CSR announced their Bluecore 6 chip today. It will ship in production volumes in January 2008. CSR claims a more robust connection – with increased transmit power and receive sensitivity. CSR also claims a breakthrough in sound quality, achieved by going from a Continuous Variable Slope Delta (CVSD) codec to Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM). This enables packet retransmission and a halving of transmission bandwidth. The reduced bandwidth requirement results in a reduction in power consumption, and the ADPCM codec yields a MOS of 4.14 compared with a maximum of 2.41 for CVSD.

This is a welcome change, but doesn’t really go far enough. What’s needed is a wideband codec like AMR-WB to yield better-than-toll quality sound. While this would be redundant in a regular cell phone – ADPCM is more than adequate to carry a signal that has been encoded in GSM – it would make a huge difference in dual-mode phones carrying Voice over Wi-Fi.

One Reply to “CSR pitches better sound quality, battery life in Bluetooth headsets”

  1. Sounds great but not much use for those wishing to connect up to IPOD etc. When they release a stereo bluetooth device that sounds as good as my hardwired entymotic earphones, I’ll sit up and pay attention.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *