The Future of Wireless Headphones is Here: Your Guide to Bluetooth 6.0
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced version 6.0 of the near-ubiquitous wireless technology in September 2024, adding major new features aimed at improving Bluetooth’s reliability, security, smoothness and efficiency. It could even give you greater range between your headphones and your phone, as well as longer battery life.
We’re finally seeing devices arrive with Bluetooth 6.0, including Apple and Google phones, as well as headphones and earbuds. Here’s what you need to know about Bluetooth 6.0 and how it will affect wireless connectivity in the years to come.
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Main improvements of Bluetooth 6.0
Latency
Latency is the time between sending an audio signal and when you actually hear it. The higher the latency, the more annoying it can be – think about when the sound lags behind the video in movies or games. Most Bluetooth devices (5.0 and newer) have a latency of between 50 and 100 milliseconds, depending on equipment and configuration, which is noticeable to most people.
Bluetooth 6.0’s new Isochronous Adaptive Layer, or ISOAL, allows devices to break audio data into smaller chunks for faster processing. In theory, this has the potential to reduce latency, and it is possible that we will see latency below 10 milliseconds in ideal conditions, such as at close range, without obstacles or interference.
We expect that in real-world conditions the majority of setups will operate with a latency of around 20 milliseconds, which would still be a significant improvement over Bluetooth 5.x.
Location tracking and security
One of the most exciting features of the new specification is called Channel Sounding, which offers a significant improvement in the accuracy of device location tracking. It relies on a round-trip exchange of data packets between connected devices and a combination of timestamps and frequency analysis, rather than the older, less precise method of simply measuring relative signal strength.
Channel Sounding is a boon to Apple’s Find My and its equivalents from Google and Samsung, offering location accuracy down to about 10 centimeters, as well as improved resistance to obstacles and interference. It also enables enhanced security for Bluetooth locking systems by using a combination of encryption, randomization and location cross-references to ensure that a random person doesn’t unlock your car or front door.
Energy efficiency and pairing speed
The same features that reduce latency also contribute to power efficiency: everything behaves intelligently to use more power to sync audio and video for things like games, and less power for less intensive applications like audiobooks. This flexibility is especially crucial for wireless headphones, which require the most efficient power management due to their compact size.
The process of finding nearby Bluetooth devices is also improved, with decision-based filtering and advertiser monitoring. In this case, advertising does not refer to the sale of your products. Basically, it’s a headset broadcasting: “I’m a headset, I’m nearby and ready to connect.”
Instead of constantly shouting, “Is there anyone there?” To see if there’s anything nearby to connect to, Bluetooth 6.0 devices will keep track of when previously paired devices come in and out of range. This should save valuable battery life, make pairing faster, and provide smoother multi-point switching.
What Bluetooth 6.0 doesn’t do
Improved Bluetooth sound quality (maybe)
Have you been expecting reliable, lossless audio transmission from your phone to your headphones? I’m still not there.
Astute readers who note that CD-quality lossless audio transmission requires a throughput speed of 1.4 Mbps may wonder why Bluetooth 6.0’s theoretical 3 Mbps isn’t enough. That’s because a lot of Bluetooth bandwidth is taken up by overhead: a bunch of ancillary data needed for secure Bluetooth connections that has nothing to do with audio. While there is some codecs that promise high-quality wireless sound, lossless CD-quality audio remains elusive.
Bluetooth 6.0 brings the optional and long-discussed LC3plus codec, which can transmit audio at up to 24-bit and 96kHz. However, unlike “classic” LC3, it is an optional codec that carries a separate licensing fee. This means that adoption will be limited compared to the most popular codecs. Remember that your device and headphones must be compatible with LC3plus for this to work. How well it works and whether it can reliably transmit 24/96 in the real world remains to be seen.
A future incremental revision of Bluetooth 6.0 promises to add a high data rate feature that will open up usable bandwidth for lossless streaming, potentially using other frequency bands besides the congested 2.4 GHz band, to achieve speeds of up to 7.5 Mbps. This should provide enough headroom to enable high-resolution audio streams, although it’s unclear whether manufacturers will adopt the right codecs for lossless Bluetooth audio through headphones. Given past and current adoption rates of different Bluetooth codecs, it’s unlikely to be Apple, and this technology will first find its way into lesser-known Android phones.
Where to find Bluetooth 6.0 now
If you want to get a head start on Bluetooth 6.0 compatibility, a handful of devices are already available (although not all of them are available in the US).
