Qualcomm’s Latest Snapdragon Sound Chip Cuts Latency To Near-Wired Levels

Qualcomm’s Latest Snapdragon Sound Chip Cuts Latency To Near-Wired Levels

Smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm has just announced a new chip under Snapdragon Sound technology dubbed “Qualcomm S3 Gen 2 Sound platform”. This chip aims to bring audio latency as low as 20 milliseconds – making it extremely close to wired solutions that range between 5-10ms.

Keep in mind that this new chip is built on top of the new Bluetooth 5.4 standard – so chances are your phone simply doesn’t support it right now. However, the specs remain promising: for reference, a typical earbud delivers audio in the range of 100-300 milliseconds, depending on make and model. Some gaming-centric models cuts the figure down in the double digits, but it’s still noticeable if you’re especially sensitive to audio delays.

That said, Qualcomm is keeping things realistic. They explicitly mentioned the chip is “optimized for gaming”, so don’t expect full audio quality with latency cut to practically bare minimum. It also noted that latency is further reduced when the audio is delivering one-way (simplex) audio, such as in-game audio.

It also supports the updated Bluetooth LE Audio Auracast feature which now delivers 24-bit 96kHz audio. The Auracast is a subset of Bluetooth’s audio feature that allows the supported device to “broadcast” its audio to an unlimited number of nearby devices.

Pokdepinion: That’s very impressive for wireless audio. Though it’d be good to know how much of the audio quality gets retained to cut latency this low.