Feeding your LDAC headphones

Published in

Gadghub

4 min readOct 3, 2020

A good wireless headphone needs as a good quality audio codec. For years apt-x was the ‘CD quality’ king but Sony’s LDAC is solidifying as the answer to wireless HiFi sound.

This post of for all those want to jump the LDAC bandowagon but don’t own an Android phone. Tech Forums are frequently showing posts of people looking for a way to get their Windows 10 laptop or Mac to send LDAC audio.

King of the codecs: LDAC

Android has native support for LDAC which is amazing. But iPhone/Mac/Windows users are left behind. It’s high time Apple or Microsoft start embracing a high bandwidth audio codec, preferably LDAC. If you’re paying $400 for a headphone 256kbits of AAC audio is not enough. High bandwidth bluetooth audio, like LDAC, is reaching 900+kbits and that’s what we want.

A recent event in world of audio devices that boosted the LDAC credibilty is the upcoming Drop Panda headphones. Drop is working on their Panda Headphones and their audio measurements show that LDAC is on par with the wired connect. With LDAC there’s virtually no need for a cable to enjoy top quality sounds.

Drop is taking the sensible stance here. If you’re spending a few hundred dollars on a headphone you don’t want the codec to be the limiting factor. Sony cans have supported LDAC for long time and now Drop is joining the gang.

Say it with LDAC

But if you want the best audio you simply pick a wired headphone, right? Well it’s not that simple. Wireless headphones are the norm for office working, because of freedom of movement. But no one should listen to compressed audio all day so Drop in answering the call for high fidelity remote office headphones. It sports the office geared features: closed back and optional microphone.

To get LDAC into your headphones as Apple/Microsoft user isn’t obvious. If you can do with ‘just’ AptX-HD there’s a very interesting option, a tiny usb-c dongle that acts as a sound card and transmits aptx-hd signal. LDAC is known for needing a bit more processing power, so perhaps it won’t fit into a tiny dongle.

LDAC is the best codec so let’s continue looking for an LDAC transmitter. The only affordable option seem to be a digital audio player, DAP for short. Which is more than you need but if it’s small and cheap then who cares. Most features and specs will be irrelevant since the signal will be mostly untouched (hopefully) reading digital the source audo compressing it with LDAC and sending it via bluetooth.

The LDAC Transmitters

Here’s a list of current audio players that support LDAC transmittion:

USB dac LDAC transmitters

There are three interesting categories of DAP here.

Tiny, no wifi or apps
Small with apps like Spotify or Tidal
Full Android

1. Tiny DAPs

Turning USB audio from a usb-c port into an LDAC bluetooth signal, that’s what these DAPs do. In a compact and light format. If you want this ‘to the point’ solution the Shanling M0 and FiiO M5 are great options, with the FiiO taking a tiny lead with its bluetooth 4.2 support. Both still get recent firmware updates so you can’t go wrong with either.

2. Small with Apps

There are several DAPs with larger screens, which doesn’t add much if you’re just buying them for their usb to LDAC capability. Though a few of these larger DAPs let you use streaming Apps like Tidal. Being able to stream your audio in the best possible quality straight from the player to your headphone is a nice feature and HiBy is taking the crown with the R3 Pro, Bluetooth 5.0 and MQA support makes this a great Tidal focussed DAP.

3. Full Android

Shanling is giving you relatilivy compact players which sport a full Android OS which hypothetically gives you the maximum availabily of streaming Apps. If you’re just looking for the LDAC transmitter these don’t seem a favourable options because they are heavy and bulky devices that makes you wonder if you shouldn’t be buying an actual Android Phone instead.