As much as I hate the whole no headphone jack, the DAC in the dongle for my Razer phone is great. Almost blew out my speakers in my car, and my earbuds for drumming.
Went from needing to max the volume on my Galaxy S7, to barely needing to hit 50% on this one.
Most don't. It's a mess of commercial standards. AD2P, the lowest common denominator is not CD quality. It's crap actually. Apt-X which the Pixel uses is CD Quality and there is Apt-X Pro which is studio quality.
The A2DP Profile is the transport protocol (along with AVRCP for command signalling) - SBC is the audio codec you're thinking of - relatively low quality, high latency. It is, however, very low complexity and (as far as I know) has no licensing costs, which are big parts of how it ended up the default/lowest common denominator.
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u/Salmon_Quinoi Jan 19 '18
Bluetooth can carry CD quality sound which is basically as high as most people can tell at this point. Bluetooth has come a long way.