Back to articles
SINCE LE AUDIO WAS ANNOUNCED by the Bluetooth SIG with great fanfare a little over five years ago, developers have been working hard to integrate the LE Audio specification into their product designs and bring commercial solutions to market. The promise of superior sound, lower latency, reduced power consumption, enhanced interoperability and simpler development of new audio device types was a powerful motivator in a multi-billion dollar market[1] where north of a billion devices are shipped each year[2].
Since 2016, Bluetooth headphones have been outselling wired ones[3]. Music streaming services and manufacturers of wireless earbuds, speakers, and smart home devices have combined to create unprecedented consumer demand. This will only reach new heights once developers launch LE Audio solutions in greater numbers and consumers understand the possibilities of the technology, particularly in terms of battery life and audio quality.
Enter Auracast
Apart from meeting the enormous consumer demand for better quality audio and longer battery life from their wireless audio solutions, a key requirement of the LE Audio specification was the ability to support broadcast audio. This was driven by the need to cater for people with hearing loss and improve on existing inductive loop technology. In 2022, the Bluetooth SIG duly announced the arrival of Auracast broadcast audio, enabling an audio source device such as a smartphone, laptop, TV, or sound system to broadcast one or several audio streams to an unlimited number of Bluetooth audio receivers.
While it took another two years for the technology to reach commercialization, it is now one of the key features of the LE Audio specification, delivering on its promise to improve the audio experience for individuals reliant on augmented and assistive listening technology. For example, people with hearing loss at a cinema or the theatre are at the mercy of how well the hearing loop infrastructure or alternative infrared accessibility system will work—if there is one at all. Without them, hearing aid users report muffled or unclear sound, difficulty hearing dialogue, and a generally diminished experience. When deployed at the venue and in hearing aids, Auracast can eliminate this problem completely.
Eliminating the language divide
A less reported benefit of Auracast is its ability to break down language barriers in our increasingly interconnected world. The capacity to broadcast multiple audio streams simultaneously from a single audio source presents the opportunity to offer different language options, particularly in public spaces and educational settings. For example, cinemas could offer different language tracks for films eliminating the need for subtitles; museums and art galleries can provide multi-language guide services direct to a visitor’s own earbuds or headphones; and international schools with multinational, multilingual and multicultural student populations can offer simultaneous audio streams in multiple languages, allowing students to tune into their preferred language, using their own devices. Developers are already pioneering solutions that combine AI simultaneous interpretation with Auracast with a response time as fast as that of a human interpreter. This opens the way for innovative applications where people can speak in their preferred language while it’s translated in real time into the language preferred by their listeners.
Meanwhile in the home, an increasing number of television programs are available with multiple language tracks, and Auracast enables different users to watch the same programming in a different language at the same time. Practically this requires all viewers to use earbuds or headphones to avoid simultaneously hearing one language through the TV speakers, and another through their own headphones, but technically it’s precisely what LE Audio and Auracast was designed to do.
Advanced SoCs bring the power to LE Audio
To bring these use cases to life and make the most of LE Audio and Auracast’s potential, Bluetooth LE SoCs with plenty of processing power balanced with low energy consumption are in high demand by audio solution developers. LE Audio’s Low Complexity Communication Codec (LC3) takes advantage of the increased processing power available in modern chipsets to compress the audio stream more effectively while performing packet-loss concealment on the fly if the need should arise, creating skip-free, high-quality audio streams. Compression is vital in a low-power application since it directly affects the required throughput, which impacts overall power consumption.
For example, Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF5340 SoC features a dedicated Arm Cortex-M33 application processor, optimized for performance and with ample overhead to look after the computational demands of advanced audio codecs. The SoC incorporates a second M33 processor to supervise wireless connectivity and which is optimized for low power consumption. Nordic's next generation nRF54H and nRF54L Series will also support the unique requirements of multiple LE Audio use cases in the near future.
These SoCs will not only support today’s LE Audio and Auracast applications but also tomorrow’s, where the processing power to support machine learning (ML) and AI may be required for increasingly sophisticated audio solutions. In so doing, Auracast and LE Audio promise an inclusive and better future where the barriers impacting hearing loss and language comprehension are removed.
- Read more: LE Audio through a technical lens
References
1. Bluetooth Audio Chips Market Size and Projections. Market Research Intellect, April 2025
2. Global Bluetooth audio device shipments 2015-2028. Statista, September 2024
3. Introducing Bluetooth LE Audio. Nick Hunn, November 2024
