LDAC is an alternative to
Bluetooth SIG's
SBC codec. Its main competitors are Huawei's L2HC, Qualcomm's
aptX-HD/
aptX Adaptive and the
HWA Union/Savitech's
LHDC. LDAC utilizes a type of
lossy compression by employing a hybrid coding scheme based on the
modified discrete cosine transform and
Huffman coding to provide more efficient data compression. By default, LDAC audio bitrate settings are set to Best Effort, which switches between discrete bitrate steps (
CBR) 330/660/990 kbps depending on connection strength; however, audio bitrate and resolution can be manually adjusted on Linux (when using PipeWire), some Android platforms (which generally requires access to the "Developer Settings" menu), and Sony's own smartphones and Walkman devices at the following rates; 330/660/990 kbps at 96/48 kHz and 303/606/909 kbps at 88.2/44.1 kHz with depth of 32, 24 or 16 bits. The
encoder library is open source and the implementation for Linux is already present in bluez-alsa, pulseaudio-modules-bt, and in PipeWire's bluez5 module. It is available on Fedora since Fedora 29. However the
decoder library is
proprietary, so receiving devices require licenses. On 17 September 2019, the
Japan Audio Society (JAS) certified LDAC with their
Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification. As of June 2024, the codecs certified by the JAS to bear the Hi-Res Audio Wireless logo are
LHDC, LDAC,
SCL6,
LC3plus, SHDC, and
aptX Adaptive. == See also ==