Audison B-CON II

Details about the Audison B-CON II

Audiophile performance over Bluetooth is, first and foremost, about the codec – the digital encoding format that both the sending device and receiving device use to transfer the data. Part of the “pairing” process is the two devices agreeing on which codec they will use. We can only select a codec that both devices – the sender and the receiver – both support.  

All Bluetooth devices support a codec called SBC. It’s the baseline codec in the Bluetooth specification. It’s not a lossless codec. It’s decent, but it’s not great, and under some conditions, it sounds pretty poor. But the Bluetooth specification lets you use a better codec than SBC – as long as it’s supported by both devices. Some of these other codecs promise to deliver “high resolution” support, but in reality, the connections made using those codecs may often not be established at the highest quality level – the user may not get what they’re expecting. It’s usually impossible to see – this happens invisibly at the Bluetooth wireless level.

LDAC is now available in many Android phone handsets, as well as many audiophile digital-media players. Like most codecs, the LDAC data connection can be implemented at various levels of quality, but at the highest level, it’s a lossless codec. Our stringent lab testing shows that over the highest-quality LDAC connection, the analog frequency response reaches 40kHz – and this is the mode that earned the B-CON the “High Resolution” certification from the JAS.

B-CON is compatible with all audio formats and reaches maximum performance with uncompressed BT streaming (max 96kHz / 24bit, only with Android LDAC devices), both playing local files and with Apps that provide Hi-Res streaming (Tidal, Qobuz…). With B-CON, you know the level of quality the connection has achieved!

B-CON also uses AAC, which is the highest-performance codec supported by iOS. (Many assume AAC is “Apple Lossless”, but Apple Lossless isn’t suitable for use with Bluetooth and no one uses it. AAC stands for Advanced Audio Codec, and it’s not a proprietary Apple thing – it’s used widely in the tech world). Even though AAC isn’t lossless, and doesn’t permit high-resolution performance above 20k, it still performs audibly better than SBC (the default Bluetooth audio codec), and that means that B-CON gives you the best sound possible from iOS devices over Bluetooth. As you can see in the figure below, the bandwidth obtained by playing a “White Noise 96 kHz / 24 bit at -3dB” audio file with LDAC codec from an Android device is 20 ÷ 48 kHz. With Apple IOS devices, bandwidth is limited to 20 ÷ 20 kHz. This limitation does not depend on the B-CON but on the type of Bluetooth codec used in the Apple device (AAC).