Convention Paper
Wireless Transmission of Audio Using Adaptive Lossless Coding
AES Convention 127 · Paper 7873 · October 2009
Abstract
In audio devices, such as smartphones, media players and wireless headsets, designers face the conflicting
requirements of elevating coded audio quality and reducing algorithm complexity, device power dissipation and
transmission bit-rates. As a result, there are significant challenges in providing highest-quality real-time audio
streaming between devices over wireless networks. Mathematically-lossless audio coding algorithms are an
attractive means of maximizing coded audio quality. However, in the context of wireless audio transmission
between portable devices, characteristics of such algorithms such as modest levels of bandwidth reduction, encoding
complexity and robustness to data loss need to be carefully controlled. Such control can be elegantly engineered by
incorporating real-time adaptation and scaling into the audio coding algorithm itself. This paper describes a lossless
audio coding algorithm called apt-X Lossless, which has been designed with scalability and automated adaptation as its principal charateristics.
