LAUNCHXL-CC26X2R1: LC3 Codec

Hi Doug,

Thank you for reaching out. We will get back to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, can you share a bit of information about your application and how LE Audio will be used?

Best Regards,

Jan

The application is a hand-held contraband detection device.  It uses beeping to indicate the presence of material, the current product has a 3.5mm jack for a wired earpiece if the agent does not want the beeping to be heard.  The plan is for the new product to use a wireless signal to bluetooth headset or ear buds.  So the audio very lo-fi.  In addition, BLE will be used to communicate low rate data to a remote device.

Hi Doug,

Thank you for telling me.

If I may, using the LC3 Codec and LE Audio to transmit a beeping might be a bit too much. I mean, no doubt you will manage to transmit the audio you want with this approach but the processing power required and the complexity introduce don't seem justified from my point of view. This may in fine negatively impact your system BOM cost.

What about considering Audio over Bluetooth LE GATT - as demoed in the SimpleLink Audio Plugin using the CC2642R device? You could then select other codecs (Opus, ADPCM, mSBC) and realize the same.
Depending on your memory size and peripheral requirements, you could consider to move down to the CC2651R3 or CC2340R5 devices. These two options (especially the second one) would allow more optimized system costs.

I hope this will help,

Best regards,

Will the other codecs work with readily available off the shelf headphones/earbuds?

I'm obviously new to Bluetooth.  I have been unable to ascertain which if any generally available headsets/earbuds support Opus, ADPCM or mSBC.  I see that SBC is required to be supported on all devices and would work fine for us.  Is mSBC compatible with SBC?  If not where can I get an SBC codec to use with TI's products?

Thanks

Hi Doug,

May I ask if you expect the agents to use their personal earbuds/headset here? If yes, then you raise a good point and may have actually to see for audio over Bluetooth Classic (ER/EDR), such as the CC2564C.

If you have control on the earbuds (i.e. if you provide those with your product) to interface with, then you can consider audio over GATT mentioned before.

In general, I would recommend to stay away from LE Audio for this use case. Few earbuds and headsets support it for the moment (so you'll have a lot of frustration from your users). And, if you are providing the earbuds, then the complexity and costs added are not really justified IMHO.

To answer your question:

Doug Broadwell85 said:

Will the other codecs work with readily available off the shelf headphones/earbuds?

To interface with existing headphones/earbuds you should look at Bluetooth Classic (CC2564C). I'll kindly ask you to open a separate thread to discuss this device as I am not an expert of it.

Doug Broadwell85 said:

I have been unable to ascertain which if any generally available headsets/earbuds support Opus, ADPCM or mSBC.  I see that SBC is required to be supported on all devices and would work fine for us.  Is mSBC compatible with SBC?  If not where can I get an SBC codec to use with TI's products?

In this discussion, the codec selection is of course important, but I wonder if we are skipping a step.
To me, you should first select the technology you want to use. Your "Bluetooth" options are Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth LE (the one I called Audio over GATT) and LE Audio. Other technologies are also possible (especially "propRF") and may more flexibility.
Once you have selected the technology, you can start looking at the Codecs:
- SBC is used for Bluetooth Classic => for this technology, please reach out to my colleagues supporting the CC2564C I am fairly certain they provide the proper audio codecs
- LC3 is mandatory for LE Audio
- For Audio over GATT, you can use pretty much the codec you want. But, both sides of the connection should agree to use the same codec.

mSBC and SBC may be compatible (it depends the exact configuration you select). But, as mentioned, the issue is that CC2642R only supports Bluetooth LE... so if your earbuds expect some Bluetooth Classic, you won't be able to establish a link.

I hope this will help,

Best regards,