LDAC (codec)
LDAC is a proprietary audio coding technology developed by Sony, which allows streaming high-resolution audio over Bluetooth connections at up to 990 kbps at 24 bit/96 kHz. It is used by various Sony products, including headphones, smartphones, portable media players, active speakers and home theaters.
LDAC is an alternative to Bluetooth SIG's SBC and LC3 codecs. Its main competitors are Qualcomm's aptX-HD/aptX Adaptive and the HWA Union/Savitech's LHDC.
LDAC is a lossy codec, which employs a hybrid coding scheme based on the Modified discrete cosine transform to provide more efficient data compression. By default, LDAC is set to Best Effort, which switches between 330/660/990 kbps depending on connection strength.
Starting from Android 8.0 "Oreo", LDAC is part of the Android Open Source Project, enabling every OEM to integrate this standard into their own Android devices freely. The encoder library is open source and the implementation for Linux is already present in bluez-alsa and pulseaudio-modules-bt. It is available on Fedora with RPM Fusion since Fedora 30. However the decoder library is proprietary, so receiving devices require licenses.
On 17 September 2019, the Japan Audio Society certified LDAC with their Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification. Currently the only codecs with the Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification are LDAC and LHDC.
