One of the big bummers about using even any of the best wireless headsets is the fact that even without any environmental noise, you know the best you’ll sound coming out the other side of your microphone and into your partner’s ears is mediocre — it’s even worse if you’re taking a call while driving. Commercial implementations of Bluetooth have come a long way for listeners, but until recently, we haven’t seen much for call quality. But Android could be making way for vehicle-based outbound audio to get better.
Android nerd Mishaal Rahman (with a hat tip to fellow Android nerd Luca Stefani) notes a recently applied patch to the Android Open Source Project repository which implements features related to Super Wideband Speech as provided for in Bluetooth’s Hands Free Profile v1.9.
In short, this will expand the range of frequencies reproduced through hands-free devices. The standard in use on the Android OS side dates from HDP v1.6 and is known in the telephony industry as Wideband, is specified to cover frequencies from 50Hz to 7KHz — it’s also commercially termed as HD Voice — through a special version of the SBC codec called mSBC.
In making the step from HFP v1.8 to v1.9 — which is still in the drafting stage — Android will upgrade to Super Wideband (50Hz-14kHz) and use the relatively new LC3 codec to make that happen. That’s just short of Fullband reproduction (20Hz-20kHz), which most consumer Bluetooth audio gear is capable of.
All things considered, this will be a great leap in call quality moving from wireless device to wireless device to wireless network to wireless… okay, you get the idea. We’ll also need hardware manufacturers to follow suit in their own ways, but hey, at least we’re on the way there.
