This wireless technology could correct the most boring thing at the idea of ​​using wireless headphones at home

Your phone is usually attached to your hip (in terms of iPhone 17 transborbo strap, I mean literally). But in the comfort of your own home when you try to relax and escape your phone with your favorite music, you have to stay in the Bluetooth range for your wireless headphones can be a bit boring. Qualcomm audio engineers are trying to solve this problem by transparent to Wi-Fi if you move from your audio source. Of course, it seems good, but technology involves a future where you will not even need another device nearby to listen to your favorite songs on your airpods.

I can already hear the groans in the comments. The problem that this feature hopes to solve is a very niche case of use, but it is the one that could be found in many new generation wireless headphones in the near future. I tested this feature at Snapdragon Summer in Hawaii (Complete disclosure: travel and accommodation were paid by Qualcomm, and Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition for acceptance of the trip), nicknamed XPAN for “extended personal network”, with a pair of non -specific reference wireless credits used by Qualcom. With the activated feature, the buds work with the phone to detect if the device is in Bluetooth beach. If you start to move away, they will automatically go to Wi-Fi.

In many ways, technology is much more interesting than the end result. The wireless headphones contained a Wi-Fi antenna, although neither the case nor the buds are very different from what I have used in the past. I walked 30 feet from the phone and back, and I didn’t notice any interruption in the song. The phone showed how it exchanged a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) connection via various other types of connections. A Bluetooth 5.3 connection range is technically close to 33 feet. Although this means that you will not lose the connection by walking from one end of the room to the other, intermediate walls or – in my case – a crowd of bodies could interrupt this signal. XPAN simply widens the range to encompass wherever there is a Wi-Fi signal.

Although wireless headphones with technology are limited to local Wi-Fi, technology could potentially allow you to listen to your device “anywhere in the world” via a Wi-Fi access point. Dino Bekis, Director of Connectivity of Qualcomm, told me in a Q&R that there was no problem with latency on Wi-Fi connection compared to Bluetooth. Modern wireless headphones are already so good to reduce latency even during audio streaming without loss of high bitrate. Wi-Fi networks should be able to manage the speeds of 96 kHz necessary for loss. It shouldn’t matter if you still use Wi-Fi 6 or modern Wi-Fi 7 nor.

“Today, with Xpan, it is 246 kHz 24 bits, but we see that the evolution of 192 kHz to be really lossless,” said Bekis.

Qualcomm has spoken of Wi-Fi audio connections in the past two years with its previous S7 and S7 Pro platforms. The first wireless headphones with integrated XPAN were the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro published earlier this year. They support the 96 kHz standard, although Bekis promised that we should see more wireless buildings early enough with current or future S7 fleas. The audiophiles would always vomit the advantages of loss and minimal latency. Ordinary people who just want to listen to their songs just care that they have to be near their twin musical source. However, the functionality can end up being more useful for taking calls with your wireless headphones than listening to music.

Inevitably, it seems that our wireless headphones will become as connected as our phones are today. What this means for music listeners is a future where we connect to Spotify or Apple Music directly in the case of our wireless headphones, rather than having to go through a phone. I do not think that we will have to wait a long time to see more cases of wireless headphones with screens used to control the music. Hell, if you succeeded in a device as dedicated to music as your old iPod, a pair of Wi-Fi wireless headphones could adapt to the bill. You will always have to pay your tithe to your favorite music streaming application, of course.