Friday, November 16, 2007

A2DP Bluetooth support confirmed in Leopard

A2DP is the Bluetooth profile* you need to be able to listen to stereo music over Bluetooth. It needs to be supported both by the player (computer, phone, MP3 player...) and the headset. The good news is that now A2DP is indeed supported by both Leopard and Vista. The bad news to me is that according to TUAW, A2DP uses some form of compression that doesn't make it HiFi:

Unfortunately, A2DP compresses the audio, so it's not exactly a high-fidelity solution. But if you really want to listen to your tunes from your Mac without wires, this is probably the way to go.
According to Wikipedia, A2DP can use multiple codecs but only the low complexity Sub Band Codecs (SBC) is mandatory. The TUAW post seems to imply that only SBC is supported by Leopard, which would be a shame.

* BTW, why is it called a profile, and not a feature, as in: do both your phone and headset support the A2DP feature? I guess that you are geeky enough to know about A2DP, you might as well go all the way and talk about A2DP profile.