Over the last two years, what started as a niche initiative in the high end audio market—the desire for hi-res audio—has gathered momentum across the ecosystem. A quick glance around any consumer electronics trade show or department store will confirm that support for higher resolution audio is now a given across a wide range of products and services.

With that in mind we decided it was time to build on the existing Qualcomm aptX audio codec platform, which revolutionized the Bluetooth stereo listening experience by supporting CD-like quality audio over a wireless connection, in order to enable audio manufacturers to meet this increasing demand.

The result is aptX HD, a newly enhanced codec that supports 24-bit music quality over Bluetooth. aptX HD is a further development of the existing classic 16-bit aptX codec. It operates on the same principle; retaining all the key properties of aptX that have seen the codec so widely adopted.

As well as accepting a 24-bit audio input, 24-bit audio resolution is maintained by using an extra two bits in each of the four sub-bands of processing. This results in lower signal-to-noise ratio (the signal strength signal strength relative to background noise) through the encode/decode cycle and less distortion, making aptX HD ideal for use as part of a high-resolution audio solution.

aptX HD is immediately available as part of the CSR8675 Bluetooth audio system-on-chip (SoC) platform which supports 24-bit audio end-to-end. The CSR8675 provides increased digital signal processing (DSP) performance and more capable I/O subsystems than any of its predecessors. It’s designed to be a superior vehicle to bring aptX HD to the Bluetooth headset and speaker space.

The aptX HD source has been initially launched for Android devices such as tablets, personal media players, and smartphones, but during the course of the next year or so it will be deployed more widely. Find out more about aptX HD and if you’re attending CES this week, be sure to visit the Qualcomm booth for a demo.

Hungry for more tech news? Find out all about Qualcomm at CES 2016.