Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound S7 Pro platform and its sibling, the S7, were largely overshadowed at this year’s Snapdragon Summit by the company’s latest laptop and mobile offerings. But make no mistake, the Snapdragon Sound S7 Pro could spark a revolution in the personal audio industry using the power of Wi-Fi.
Now, audio devices that use Wi-Fi have been around for some time, and they work similarly to their Bluetooth counterparts. However, instead of connecting to a source directly, Wi-Fi headphones connect to a network. This means that devices that use Wi-Fi can work much farther away from whatever it is they’re paired with compared to Bluetooth while delivering better audio quality as long as they’re connected to the same network.
The downside with Wi-Fi devices is that they drain batteries significantly faster than their competition, which is probably why they’re not nearly as popular or prevalent as Bluetooth devices.
Qualcomm claims it has solved this issue as the S7 Pro–through the company’s new Snapdragon Sound platform–will supposedly allow Wi-Fi devices to deliver lossless audio without having the power inefficiency that older products were known for.
“[N]ow that we’ve got the power consumption part down and we can put Wi-Fi into an earbud, we can deliver 96kHz lossless audio to the earbuds over Wi-Fi,” Dino Bekis, Qualcomm’s vice president and general manager, explained in an interview with The Verge.
“And you’ll see here that we can do that with the same 10 hours of playback on a 50mAh hour cell so we can deliver lossless audio over Wi-Fi at the same power consumption of lossy audio over Bluetooth,” he added.
Granted, devices equipped with the S7 and S7 Pro will still have Bluetooth to complement their Wi-Fi capabilities, providing an overall better experience for consumers.
As a result of this pairing, people can, for example, move away from their device’s range and still have their earphones play music because their device’s connection was handed over from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi. And this will reportedly work across different access points as well.
Those excited to test this new innovation will need to wait until next year as that is when Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3–a prerequisite for S7 and S7 Pro–will come out.
As Audio-Technica, Bose, Edifier, Fiio, Jabra, LG, Master & Dynamic, and Shure are Snapdragon Sound partners, we can expect them to release devices with the S7 and S7 Pro around that time.