The Story of aptX - An Epic Journey

Widely recognized as a high-quality audio compression algorithm, used in film sound to radio broadcast, studios and finally in Bluetooth, where its incorporated into billions of devices, the successful story of aptX technology is inextricably linked to the history of digital audio and a remarkable corporate journey, from APT to CSR and Qualcomm. This article offers an insider's overview of the aptX audio codec adoption and evolution, and how the technology was interlinked with the author's professional career for the past 28 years. This article was originally published in audioXpress, October 2022.

Swedish digital audio processing pioneer Dirac and Australian headphone company Nura announced a collaboration on the upcoming NuraTrue Pro wireless earbuds, featuring Dirac Virtuo spatial audio. The latest earbuds from Nura mark the first collaboration between the two companies and demonstrate Dirac’s growing leadership position in the headphone market – after establishing its technology in the automotive, home theater, and mobile markets. The NuraTrue Pro earbuds are now fully funded on Kickstarter.

At Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona, Qualcomm announced new options for brands and developers to offer the latest technologies in wireless audio. Qualcomm announced the latest S5 and S3 Sound Platforms with support for new Snapdragon Sound experiences, featuring lossless CD-quality streaming over Bluetooth, stereo recording, ultra-low latency sound with in-game chat, and adaptive active noise cancellation. Both new platforms already offer support for Bluetooth LE Audio.

We looked at the most-read articles of 2021 in audioXpress.com (including selected articles from Voice Coil magazine), and we created this Top 10 list of news stories and online articles. 2021 expanded slightly on the record-breaking year that was 2020 for audioXpress.com, in terms of number of visits and regular users of the website. Visitors from all over the world returned more often to read the more than 7,700 stories available. Which of the topics and stories published online in 2021 were the most popular? Here are the results!

Reacting to the fact that streaming music services have started to offer lossless music streaming options, Qualcomm has now extended its aptX Adaptive set of technologies - supported by its latest Snapdragon Sound processors - to also include a CD-quality lossless option over Bluetooth. The new aptX Lossless technology expands options available for Bluetooth wireless audio, combining codec, wireless link and RF optimizations.