Lossless Bluetooth could finally reach your iPhone or Pixel, and Qualcomm is fine with that

For years, getting the best sound from wireless earbuds has come down to codecs, the technology that compresses music over Bluetooth, and whether your phone supports the good ones. Most Samsung, Pixel, and iPhone owners have never listened with aptX Lossless, Qualcomm’s CD-quality Bluetooth tech, because their phones don’t support it. At Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui, I sat down with Andrew Laister, staff product manager for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound platforms, to talk about the new Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 chip. Whether we were talking about aptX, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or the apps running on your earbuds, his message kept coming back to the same idea: the things that have held wireless audio back are going away.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On aptX and lossless Bluetooth

Samsung and Google support basic aptX, but neither supports aptX Adaptive or aptX Lossless, and Apple doesn’t support aptX at all. Have there been conversations with those companies about adopting it? What’s the holdup?

I can’t talk on their behalf. But there are always these kinds of conversations. At the same time, we’re making a platform for these customers to use the way they want to, so it’s ultimately always their choice. They sometimes look at the world a little differently. There may be an alternative way of having a lossless stream, and they still benefit from our connectivity to do that. We’re happy with that.

This Bluetooth HDT rollout would be one of those moments where it actually doesn’t matter whether you use aptX or the standard version from Bluetooth, as long as the end user still gets that lossless stream. We love that.

Bluetooth HDT (High Data Throughput) is a new feature from the Bluetooth SIG, the group that sets the Bluetooth standard. It’s supported on Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2.

What does HDT actually improve for listeners?

On Gen 1, we already had lossless streaming over Bluetooth. To achieve that, we needed a Qualcomm proprietary link we call QHS, the Qualcomm High Speed Link. You’re talking about over a megabit a second of audio, and you can’t sustain that over old-school Bluetooth.

HDT is a higher data rate link. Similar to QHS, it allows streaming rates that enable lossless playback. Other applications could be multiple channels of audio, or more devices sharing the airwaves, so you get less congestion and less interference. But there’s now this opportunity for lossless streaming in a standard way. You don’t need a specific Qualcomm phone and a specific Qualcomm earbud. Any phone will be able to benefit from this.

People say, “You won’t want the Bluetooth SIG to do this, because that’s your thing.” No, it’s the opposite. It validates that what we’re doing is important enough to become a standard.

So if it’s lossless, it’s lossless?

In ideal situations, lossless is lossless. One of the things you get with aptX that you may not get with other approaches is that we certify it. We know a phone and an earbud or headset work together across devices and manufacturers. We also do a lot under the hood, so if the connection gets worse, it can scale down the bitrate to keep streaming without interruption.

We got heavily involved in how the Bluetooth version of lossless will roll out, so we’d expect it to be a high-quality experience too. If Samsung’s phones and Apple’s phones were to pick up the Bluetooth standard, it will flow through to all users regardless.

Whether your phone will get HDT is up to its manufacturer. Samsung, Google, and Apple haven’t announced support.

On streaming over Wi-Fi

With Wi-Fi built into the chip, can earbuds stream music at higher quality than Bluetooth allows?

With S7 Gen 1, we launched XPAN, and it’s a technology we continue to invest in. Say I’m on a Teams call on my laptop, streaming over Bluetooth, and I go grab a coffee. In my house, and it’s not a big house at all, the audio breaks up when I go down the stairs. Consistently. Now with XPAN, the earbuds know when Bluetooth range is getting limited and instantly hop over to Wi-Fi. It goes back and forth. It’s not about always using Wi-Fi. It’s about which connection is best for the moment.

And while the Bluetooth standard sticks with CD-quality lossless, there’s still the option of 96kHz lossless with us over Wi-Fi. There’s always been a debate over where the limit of audible quality is. We want to take that conversation away and say the codec is no longer in the way.

Qualcomm later clarified that the current version supports 96kHz lossless audio over Wi-Fi, though the chip is technically capable of up to 192kHz. The company is still confirming which phones and laptops it will work with.

Laister also stressed that the sound quality upgrades go beyond lossless streaming. Qualcomm has updated the chip’s converters for both the microphones and audio output, and a new Class DG mode means brands no longer have to choose between the best sound quality and the lowest power use. “These aren’t the exciting things we get to say on stage,” he said, “but we don’t stop when it comes to audio quality.”

On noise cancelling and call quality

Noise cancelling and voice pickup are both improved. What’s driving that, and will people hear the difference?

I’m biased, but yeah. People are now taking calls in noisy places with other people sitting right next to them, also talking. I call it the Gerard problem, because Gerard sits next to me in the office, and no matter what I try with my old headset, his voice breaks through. Everyone’s like, “Andy, can you please mute? I can hear Gerard.”

So we have a new technology we call the AI Speech Bubble. It uses AI on the device to make a bubble around the user. If you’re inside the bubble, it picks up your voice. If you’re outside, it won’t. In the demo, you start a phone call, walk away, and the moment you go through the wall, you’re gone. You can shout and clap your hands, and it doesn’t come through on the other end.

Traditional noise filtering is like a water bed: you push down one bit and another bit pops up. AI gives you different levers. Now distance is something you can play with.

Does that help with wind noise? It’s something earbud microphones really struggle with.

Absolutely. If a device uses a fixed noise-cancelling algorithm and the wind comes through, it tries its best to cancel it but can’t quite keep up. With Gen 2, the device can detect events like someone slamming a car door or wind rushing by, and change how it’s handling noise cancellation right there in the moment. We call it acoustic event handling.

Qualcomm didn’t have measurable figures to share for the noise cancelling or voice pickup improvements. It says the focus is on making both adapt faster to changing surroundings, and on giving brands more flexibility to tune them.

You mentioned earbuds with cameras could help identify sounds around you. How useful is that when the cameras are low resolution for privacy?

You’ll be able to use even very low-resolution images to know a face is there. You may not know who it is. You’d never use these cameras for a Teams call or a photo of the beach in Hawaii. But you’d know there’s a shape that looks like a face coming towards you, and that’s enough for the earbuds to let you hear that person. It all happens on the device, and once the moment has passed, it effectively forgets about it.

On apps and AI agents in your earbuds

Apps can now download directly to the earbuds. Will they always need Wi-Fi, or can they work offline?

It’s up to each app developer. If you want your run playlist always available on your earbuds, you can do that. If you need to reach a cloud-based AI agent, Wi-Fi is there. New Wi-Fi technologies also let your earbuds connect through your phone or watch, so you’ve got that cloud connection wherever you are.

Earbuds don’t have much storage. Will people be juggling apps?

Trying to explain these detailed differences to people would be an uphill struggle. So the device maker holds the keys to the app store, not the end user. They tick a box: “I want these apps, I don’t want that one.” The apps come ready to go.

The benefit is that until now, a company had to deeply integrate an app into its earbuds, test it over and over, and then repeat that whole process every time the app needed an update. That’s why your phone apps update all the time and your earbuds don’t. With this new framework, apps can update on their own, independently of the rest of the earbuds.

A lot of our readers don’t know where to start with an EQ, the settings that adjust bass, treble, and everything in between. Could AI handle that for them?

You don’t have to go hunting through a settings menu on your phone. You can just say, “Make this a bit bassier.” The AI agent understands what that means, turns it into EQ settings, and sends them back down to your earbuds. You can confirm or adjust from there.

What’s next?

None of these features will reach you until brands build them into actual products. Qualcomm has confirmed Bose, HP, and Cleer as early partners building on Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, though Laister couldn’t share what they’re working on. When those products do arrive, one of the more practical upgrades should be battery life. Qualcomm told me it expects up to 15 to 25% better battery life over Bluetooth compared to the previous generation, depending on what you’re doing (music or phone calls, for example) and how each brand builds its earbuds.

In the meantime, Laister is already using HP’s headset built on the previous generation chip. “No one can hear Gerard anymore,” he said.