In the patent illustration, there is a set of optical transmitter and receiver between glasses and earplugs for transmitting optical signals; There is also an additional radio frequency (Bluetooth) transceiver in the earplug shown in the figure, which is used for Bluetooth audio reception between the mobile phone and the earplug.
Usually, Apple's headset devices, such as AirPods, use the Bluetooth transmission protocol. Due to the limited transmission bandwidth of Bluetooth, AirPods is limited to highly compressed AAC codec, and only after compression and decoding can audio signals be obtained. Therefore, although Apple Music supports lossless audio, the details in music are still not available through AirPods.
In May last year, Apple officially announced that Apple Music would adopt the new lossless audio coding format ALAC to provide lossless music comparable to CD sound quality. Subsequently, the support of Dolby panoramic sound space audio and lossless audio is realized in iOS 14.6.
Further reading: Lossless Audio Wanzi Feature: Sony Apple Qualcomm Huawei QQ Music … Why are you obsessed with "the sound quality comparable to CD"?
Optics provides a wider audio transmission bandwidth than Bluetooth, and can support lossless high-resolution audio files that Bluetooth audio cannot achieve.
However, optical audio transmission has some disadvantages, it can only work in a short range, and there can be no line of sight between transmitter and receiver. Therefore, it is feasible to realize optical audio transmission between the earphone and the earplug described in the patent, but it is not feasible to realize transmission between the mobile phone and the earplug in the pocket, and the mobile phone needs to be taken out.
Therefore, RF transceiver is added in the patent to solve the above problems. If the optical signal transmission fails, the earplug can be replaced by Bluetooth transmission, but the lossless audio can not be realized when Bluetooth transmission.
Comment on Wan Li: Any new technology has its limitations. Therefore, although this patent has solved a problem, there is still a new problem that has not been completely solved. As for whether the upcoming AirPods Pro 2 will adopt this technology, it is still very embarrassing.
Author: Zhou Sensen/Shenzhen Bay