Are you an owner of a Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2? Bose has got a New Year gift for you! The buds are planned for a new firmware upgrade that will amp up the sound quality of the drivers.
QuietComfort Earbuds II next-generation wireless earbuds are engineered to fit you.
If you missed it, Bose partnered with Qualcomm at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2022. And as a part of this partnership, Bose is preparing to make the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2 get a free over-the-air update.
The update is set for early 2023 and will arrive to all the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2 out there.
And after the update, the buds will unlock aptX Lossless and aptX Adaptive support. That will make the wireless earbuds capable of streaming audio tracks at maximum quality.
On that note, the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2 was already an excellent pick for the money. It came with next-gen Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) tech, which left many users in awe.
The buds can adequately cancel out the environmental noise and enable the users to dive deeply into their favorite tracks.
Well, now that the sound output has just got better, it definitely gained an improved value proposition. And it’s not like the earbuds offered a bad sound output at launch.
The drivers are really capable of providing a decent music-listening experience. However, it fell a little behind compared to the flagships of Samsung and Sony.
Now, with the aptX Lossless support, users will be able to stream audio tracks at 16-bit/44.1kHz over Bluetooth.
According to Qualcomm, the data rates of this codec are up to 1200 kbps. And that makes the buds capable of handling large-sized files. Furthermore, there is the aptX Adaptive support.
As the name suggests, this codec dynamically adjusts the bitrate. And according to Qualcomm, the adjustment range is from 279 kbps and 420 kbps.
Although it is a bit short of what Sony is offering with LDAC, it is still an improvement over the regular codes. That said, aptX Lossless is not entirely lossless.
The codec does some compression for the CD-quality audio data. In most cases, it will squeeze down the 1411 kbps audio to a maximum of 1200 kbps bitrate. Still, the compressed data sounds impressive even after the compression.
Nonetheless, the exact date of the update is not confirmed yet. However, you can definitely see your Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2 get the update in early 2023.
And if you are not an owner of the buds, it is a great time to consider one. The buds check pretty much all the boxes for being one of the best earbuds of 2022.
Slava is a man of mystery and no-one seems to know exactly where he is at any point in time. When he isn't enjoying writing about all things audio and technical he can be found researching his next project of interest. The man never rests.
This post was last updated on 2024-12-14 / Some images from Amazon Product API & some links may be affiliate links which may earn us a commission from purchases.
I’m afraid you’ve made the common mistake of misunderstanding the difference between a local playback bit rate and a transmission bit rate. As well as not understanding that not all compression means loss.
aptX Lossless transmits over the air at 1,200kbps but it decompresses in the ear back to bit-for-bit perfect for local playback rate from buffer. There is no loss at all when the 1,200kbps transmission rate was achieved and maintained.
Also, and this is more Qualcomm’s bizarre lack of up-to-date information about its own technologies, aptX Adaptive has several iterations now. The original did up to 420kbps but the iterations since 2019 have supported up to 860kbps to support 24-bit 96kHz Hi-Res audio. Again, these figures are the data rate between source and receiver. They don’t say anything about the data when decompressed for playback.
There’s too many reviewers/bloggers unknowingly, incorrectly comparing codecs by transmission rate. Naively thinking that’s what separates them from each other. What separates them is the algorithms that compress the data either losslessly (in the case of ALAC) or lossy. These algorithms are all different with some being entirely proprietary. Their transmission rate does not dictate the quality that plays back.