Qualcomm’s New Minuscule Sound Chip Fits Wi-Fi Lossless Audio in Your Ears
For years, Qualcomm has been showing off its XPAN features, an attempt to enable users to get their audio over Wi-Fi and not just Bluetooth. I demoed those capabilities at last year’s Snapdragon Summit, but this year, the chipmaker is trying to make wireless audio go full audiophile-ready with a second-gen Snapdragon Sound Elite chip.
The tiny Sound Elite Gen 2 chip includes micro-power Wi-Fi 6E connectivity. Hooking up your buds to your router may mean you’ll no longer need to be standing within a few feet of your phone or audio device to listen to your tunes, audiobooks, or calls. Instead, Qualcomm promises you can walk around the house freely, not worried about being on different floors or standing between walls that could disrupt your quality connection.
The chip can make use of 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz wireless bands. In essence, this could allow for more headphones, earbuds, and even smart glasses, the ability to tap into more wireless bands than Bluetooth by itself.
Qualcomm debuted the new chip at Snapdragon Summit (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Qualcomm, and Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip). However, the chipmaker isn’t the first to enable Wi-Fi capabilities. My colleague, Gizmodo senior reporter of consumer tech James Pero, just reviewed the updated Sonos Ace Ultra headphones with the ability to switch audio from the headphones to speakers over Wi-Fi. Qualcomm’s tech is still relatively unique for earbuds.
The chip is also running the aptX Lossless codec for 16-bit 44.1kHz lossless and so-called “CD-quality” audio, but that’s not why the lossless fanatics were interested in the first place. When last I used XPAN, Qualcomm told me the feature then supported up to 24-bit at 96KHz for higher-quality audio.
The full extent of XPAN’s capabilities shows that it shoots up to 24-bit, 192kHz audio for true hi-res lossless sound when streaming over Wi-Fi. The real question is which devices we’ll see this in. Qualcomm didn’t have much to share on that point except for a new partnership with Cleer for a pair of earbuds with built-in cameras.
Yes, the sensors are used for AI capabilities. It’s currently unclear whether those buds will become an actual consumer product you can buy, at least in the U.S.
It’s meant to support all the standard active-noise-cancelling features, including a transparency mode and a revised 5th-gen “adaptive” mode to tune in when your Starbucks barista is calling you the wrong name (“Kylie Barr? Is there a Kylie Barr here?”). I’d first want to compare its ANC features to something like the Thus chip inside Anker Soundcore’s recent Liberty 5 Pro Max—whose ANC capabilities were the reason I was able to survive the total nine hours of flight time to Hawaii.
There are other upgrades here, including a promised 40% better power efficiency compared to the previous Snapdragon S7+ Gen 1 platform. And here comes the expected part: the new sound chip is also built around—you guessed it—AI. That includes its own pint-sized eNPU (neural processing unit) that’s supposed to work in tandem with your phone’s on- and off-device AI processing.
I know what you’re thinking. You’d prefer your next-gen headphones and earbuds to eschew AI altogether. After all, any AI assistant is going to be dependent on your connected device and cloud-based processing. As much as you may be growing tired of it, AI is slowly becoming a more established use case for earbuds. You can see this trend in the Google Buds 2a. Apple may even stick cameras in its next-gen AirPods to give the AI more context. Again, this chip isn’t just made for audio devices—they could be used for audio glasses (anything with cameras would require a chip like the Snapdragon Wear Elite).
Qualcomm’s goal these last few years has been to shove AI capabilities into smaller and smaller devices. In reality, it just means there are fewer and fewer ways to ignore the chatbot takeover—especially when AI is shoved directly in your ear canal.
