AptX Bluetooth, is it going to improve the SQ out of my wireless headphones?

[doraymon]

Hi,

I recently bought a pair of Momentum Wireless because as a recent father, business flights represent rare moments when I can enjoy some music.

 

QUESTIONS:

1) The headphones support aptX but my iPhone 6s doesn't. Is this a limitation considering that 90% of the time when on the go the source of music is Spotify Premium (320kbps)?

 

2) Technically Bluetooth 4.0 supports a data rate of up to 24Mbps. Streaming CD quality music brings around 1.5Mbps, so why do I have to use aptX in order to stream CD quality music to my wireless headphones?

 

3) is it correct to say that CD quality would produce 1.5Mbps while Spotify only 320Kbps? Is this an apples to apples comparison?

 

Thanks for clarifying my doubts!

[Ceanothus]

1) You'll get the best outcome by getting the Spotify bitstream to the headphones and decoding there. Is that possible - don't know. If you've decoded in the phone, then the rationale of Aptx is that it's a better codec than Bluetooth gives you for standard. But it's your ears that judge whether this matters in your use case.

 

2) Supports and reliably delivers in real world situations are very different things. Especially with congestion in the 2.4GHz band.

 

3) Not entirely. A fairer comparison would be between a FLAC encoding of the CD and Spotify.