This is an interesting story as it demonstrates the importance on hi-res audio in China. Here we see the coming together of a major brand, a major audio streaming service and an audio codec vendor, to help drive hi-res audio to the consumer. QQ audio is one of China’s most popular audio streaming services and has supported hi-res since 2020. It is owned by Tencent.
LHDC is one of several proprietary Bluetooth audio codecs available to consumers that aims to improve upon the audio quality enabled through the standard SBC codec. There are questions about the longevity of these proprietary codecs with the introduction of LC3, alongside Bluetooth LE audio. LC3 attempts to achieve all the advantages that many of the proprietary codecs achieve, such as higher audio quality, adaptability and lower latency, etc.
