

Just to showcase the way that AAC compression changes quite substantially depending on the content being played, here’s our square wave test too:Īll of the codecs are very quiet down below 1kHz, as there’s no content. Definitely nothing close to CD quality here. This isn’t quite as bad as it looks, but finer details from real music files will end up lost under this noise floor. The Huawei P20 Pro’s noise floor is considerably worse than the Note 8, hitting highs of -42dB around our 1kHz tone. At -73dB we’re a long way from CD quality (96dB), but you will hear noise if you crank your tunes. It offers a reasonably consistent level of noise at around -73dB around all of our test tones, and impressive background noise of -110dB.
#Using tws earbuds for mac code android
For example: the Huawei P20 Pro, famous for its focus on power optimization, produces an AAC result inferior to the Galaxy Note 8 and iPhone 7.Įven our best Android phone in the mix, The Galaxy Note 8, is clearly worse than the iPhone 8 across all frequencies. Therefore, smartphones that prioritize energy efficiency over performance will encode AAC Bluetooth to a much lower bit rate and quality. This explains why the noise is higher around the louder 1kHz peak tone, as AAC exploits our brain’s tendency not to notice soft sounds in the presence of louder ones in order to hide the noise.ĪAC uses psychoacoustic modeling to transmit data, which makes it a very processor-heavy codec compared to SBC or aptX. We can see that the noise level around our test tones seems to roughly follow the amplitude.

This falls just shy of 16 bits worth of data. The iPhone 7’s implementation of AAC does a reasonable job at all frequencies, peaking at -91dBFS at 1kHz. What we’re interested in, though, is the noise around the bits of audio we want to hear, checking that they aren’t masked or distorted. Note how the noise floor drops between the test spikes: AAC completely discards this data, as there’s nothing to hear. We’re also playing back lossless content at the moment, to test the Bluetooth codec’s compression rather than be bound by limitations of the file type.įirst, this data showcases a great example of the psychoacoustic compression algorithms used by AAC. The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is included as a mid-point in quality.

#Using tws earbuds for mac code pro
To test the noise floor, we’re going to look at the best and worse case scenarios for AAC-so the iPhone 7 and Huawei P20 Pro respectively.
