Your Android phone is hiding your headphones' best audio quality — here's how to unlock it

Your Android phone might be capable of far more Bluetooth audio options than you think. You see, most of the time, Android’s Bluetooth audio menu exposes only a small fraction of what your phone and headphones can actually do. For more advanced settings, you may need to reach for your headphones’ companion app or dive into Android’s Developer Settings, where a much wider selection of Bluetooth codecs and playback modes is available.

Take my aging Sony WH-1000XM3, for example. It technically supports Qualcomm’s aptX, yet my phone’s regular Bluetooth settings only offer LDAC as the high-definition option and SBC for standard playback. Some phones don’t even expose an HD codec option at all.

Head into Developer Settings, though, and the picture changes dramatically. Depending on the phone and headphones, you may find options for SBC, AAC, aptX, aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, LDAC, and LHDC. Not all of these will actually work with your particular hardware, and codec support varies considerably between manufacturers. My Pixel 11 Pro XL, for instance, doesn’t expose the more advanced aptX options.

To find these options, first pair your headphones via Bluetooth as normal. Then open the Settings app, navigate to About Phone, and find the Build Number.

Tap the build number about 10 times until you see a prompt confirming you have developer access. From there, navigate to the newly unlocked Developer Options in the settings menu. Scroll down to the Networking/Bluetooth section and look for options that include Bluetooth Audio Codec, LDAC Playback Quality, and audio bits per sample. That first option displays a list of supported audio codecs, as shown in the picture at the top of this article.

So why does Android hide all these choices? What do the different codecs actually do, and which ones are worth using? Here’s a rundown of the major Bluetooth audio codecs, what they’re best at, and which settings are actually worth paying attention to.

Bluetooth codecs explained

Sub-BandCodec (SBC)

SBC is the mandatory audio codec supported by all Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) Bluetooth devices. It’s low-complexity, making it easy to implement and compute with the limited Bluetooth bandwidth and processing capabilities available at the time of its introduction.

Not that SBC is unsophisticated. The codec splits the audio signal into eight frequency “subbands” and uses dynamic bit allocation to quantize and compress the less important subbands—typically the higher-frequency bands with less perceivable audible information. To preserve quality, the PCM quantizer adjusts its range per transfer block, but the result is still a higher noise floor than your uncompressed audio, particularly at higher frequencies. While it can undoubtedly sound more than good enough in less-than-ideal listening environments, it is not as computationally complex as other codec options available today.

There are a few SBC implementation options floating around now, with bitrates ranging from a rather low 229 kbit/s to 345 kbit/s for the standard medium and high profiles. There’s also a far more reasonable 512 kbit/s SBC XQ codec used in some Linux distributions, which is a more competitive rival to some of the codecs listed below. Rather than bitrate, the main limitations of SBC are that it’s limited to 48kHz, 16-bit audio, meaning it can’t handle Hi-Res formats without prior conversion. It’s also reasonably high latency, in the region of 100-200ms, making it less sutiable for real-time audio.

What this means in practice: SBC is the fallback codec you’ll almost always be able to use, but if your phone and headphones support something better, there’s little reason to choose it manually.

Low Complexity Communication Codec (LC3)

In 2020, the Bluetooth SIG announced that the royalty-free audio codec LC3 would become the successor to SBC for devices sporting Bluetooth 5.2 and above. The codec has meaningful improvements, including support for lower bit rates to reduce dropouts, lower power consumption, more robust protection against packet loss, and higher sound quality than SBC at the same bit rate. LC3 is still limited to 48kHz, 16-bit audio with a maximum bit rate of 345kbps.

It’s an all-around upgrade and has the benefit of being shipped as the default codec for newer Bluetooth profiles. The catch is that LC3 is more important to Bluetooth’s newer LE Audio architecture than it is to the codec picker you’ll find on today’s Android phones. So while it represents the future of Bluetooth audio, you may not see it as a selectable option yet.

Advanced Audio Encoding (AAC)

You might recognize AAC from your audio library; it was, and remains, a popular lossy compression format for storing music, dating back to 1997 as an alternative to MP3. It’s also surprisingly capable for Bluetooth audio, with good quality at relatively modest bitrates. However, Bluetooth performance depends heavily on the implementation. Android devices commonly use bitrates between 128 and 320kbps, while Apple’s iPhone typically uses 256kbps.

Unlike SBC, AAC relies heavily on psychoacoustic compression techniques — essentially algorithms designed to remove information that you are unlikely to hear. The codec uses a Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) to convert blocks of audio from the time domain into frequency-domain data, allowing it to analyze which parts of the signal are most perceptually important. It can then discard or reduce information that would be masked by louder sounds or falls outside the range of human hearing, before using quantization and lossless entropy coding to further reduce the data required for transmission.

The technical advantage is that AAC can deliver good perceived quality without requiring the relatively high bitrate of codecs such as LDAC. In practice, it’s one of the safest choices when compatibility matters, particularly across phones and headphones from different manufacturers. Just don’t assume that AAC sounds identical on every Android phone: the encoder implementation and bitrate can vary, which is one reason AAC has a somewhat different reputation on Android than it does on Apple’s hardware.

Qualcomm aptX

aptX is based on a similar subband encoding idea as SBC, but has a different approach to reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. It uses adaptive differential pulse-code modulation (ADPCM), which encodes the difference between an audio sample and a predicted value rather than sending each sample in full. A good prediction means those differences can be represented with fewer bits, reducing the amount of data required while keeping errors relatively small.

The signal is split into four subbands, with more bits allocated to the frequencies where they’re most useful. The result is relatively low error in the core musical frequencies, at the expense of more loss and noise toward the higher frequencies.

But aptX is really a family of codecs rather than a single option. The four versions you’re most likely to encounter are aptX Classic, aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, and aptX Lossless. They share the same general compression philosophy, but make different trade-offs between bitrate, quality, latency, and connection reliability.

The original aptX uses a fixed 384kbps bitrate, while aptX HD increased that to 576kbps and added support for 24-bit, 48kHz audio. Those higher specifications don’t necessarily translate into an audible improvement over CD-quality, but the extra bitrate gives aptX HD more room to work with.

aptX Adaptive takes a different approach. Rather than sticking to one bitrate, it can dynamically adjust the amount of data being transmitted according to the quality of the wireless connection. That means it can prioritize sound quality when the radio link is strong, then reduce the bitrate when interference or distance makes dropouts more likely. Later revisions added support for compressed 24-bit, 96kHz audio and introduced aptX Lossless, which can transmit 16-bit, 44.1kHz CD-quality audio losslessly under favorable conditions.

That makes aptX Adaptive particularly interesting for everyday listening: the goal isn’t simply to push the highest possible bitrate, but to find a balance between audio quality and a reliable connection. aptX Lossless takes the opposite approach, prioritizing the ability to preserve CD-quality audio when the necessary hardware and connection conditions are available.

aptX support varies widely across headphone and phone manufacturers, so seeing aptX in Android’s Developer Settings doesn’t necessarily mean every version is available. If your phone and headphones support multiple aptX variants, Adaptive is generally the more flexible choice, while Lossless is the one to look for if you’re specifically interested in lossless CD-quality playback.

Sony’s Low-Delay Audio Codec (LDAC)

Not to be outdone by Qualcomm, Sony launched its proprietary LDAC in 2015. LDAC’s big claim to fame is its huge bitrate. It ships in three bitrate options: 330 kbps, 660 kbps, and 990kbps and supports 24-bit, 96kHz playback, making it one of the most capable widely supported options for high-resolution Bluetooth audio.

LDAC’s algorithm remains a tightly guarded secret, but rather than using wide subbands, it converts audio into a Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT)-based representation, much like AAC but with a focus on supporting higher bandwidths and very fast compression, rather than optimal quality at a tiny bitrate. With MDCT, audio is “banked” into hundreds or thousands of very fine-grained frequency bands, not just four or eight subbands. Once in the frequency domain, it’s a matter of running psychoacoustic models to mask inaudible content, assign bit allocation, and quantize the banks based on their frequency and the amount of content they contain. Again, detail is sacrificed at harder-to-perceive higher frequencies to ensure accuracy at the core musical frequencies, which somewhat undermines the purpose of using LDAC for 96kHz playback.

An important point about LDAC is that, while it supports three levels of compression, the default playback mode is actually “best effort.” The codec will automatically switch between the three modes depending on signal quality, much like aptX Adaptive. The only way to be sure you’re listening to a very high-quality mode is to manually toggle the option in Android’s Developer Settings. But higher isn’t always better: if 990kbps causes regular dropouts, 660kbps or even a different codec may deliver a better listening experience.

Savitech Low Latency High-Definition Audio Codec (LHDC)

On paper, LHDC is surprisingly similar to LDAC. It also supports a variety of bitrate profiles, the most common of which are 400, 560, and 900 kbps. However, the newest LHDCv5 revision introduced a wider range of options from 128 kbps up to 1,400 kbps and added support for 24-bit, 192 kHz Hi-Res, and Lossless streaming quality. While the underlying psychoacoustic and quantization algorithms differ slightly, the approach is similar enough that I won’t rehash the explanation.

Google recently brought LHDC support to Pixel phones with Android 17, but you’ll need compatible headphones to see the option. That’s particularly interesting because LHDC support is growing quickly, particularly in more affordable earbuds and headphones from Asian manufacturers. LDAC has become the widely recognized premium Bluetooth codec, while LHDC has become an attractive way for Asian phone/earbud manufacturers to differentiate affordable and midrange products with high-resolution Bluetooth audio. This could be down to their different licensing agreements, where LDAC is licensed to Sony technology while LHDC offers more of an alliance/ecosystem model.

In any case, LHDC is an impressively flexible option, and its growing support makes it a credible alternative to LDAC. But if Android now has so many capable codecs, why does LDAC remain the default high-definition option?

Why is LDAC Android’s HD default?

After flicking through this list of expanding codecs, you might well be asking yourself why Sony’s LDAC is the default high-definition codec of choice and whether it’s really worth switching to an alternative. LDAC support was introduced in the OS all the way back in Android 8.0, with full encoder source/binary integration, so Android manufacturers don’t have to obtain a proprietary encoder separately.

This essentially gave Android a high-quality codec supported across a wide range of handsets and high-end headphone products. Other great-sounding codecs, such as aptX, were and remain optional licensing agreements. Alternative codecs are very common in both headphones and smartphones now, but LDAC has stuck around as the default essentially because Sony locked into AOSP at the right time.

However, it’s worth noting that manufacturers can change Android’s default priority list. So phones that license technologies like aptX Lossless or LHDC can shift users towards these enhancements by default, where supported, but many are equally happy with the standard order of priority. If you’re not, that’s where Android’s Developer Settings comes in handy.

We’ll have to see if LDAC remains Android’s default Hi-Res Bluetooth codec in the years ahead. With Pixels now supporting LHDC and an increasing number of phones and earbuds adopting the standard, there’s certainly potential for the balance to shift.

But LDAC isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Its broad support, integration into Android, and relatively high bitrate still make it a compelling choice, particularly if your headphones support it reliably. At the same time, the arrival of newer options such as LHDC and aptX Lossless shows that Bluetooth audio is far from standing still.

Ultimately, the “best” Bluetooth codec isn’t necessarily the one with the biggest bitrate or the longest list of supported formats. Compatibility, connection stability, latency, power consumption, and the implementation on your particular phone and headphones can matter just as much. Android’s Developer Settings gives you more control over those trade-offs, but it doesn’t automatically make the highest-numbered option the best one.

Don’t chase the biggest number. If LDAC at 990 kbps causes dropouts while AAC or aptX Adaptive stays rock solid, the latter is probably the better choice. Bluetooth audio is ultimately a compromise between quality, reliability, latency, and compatibility — not a race to the highest bitrate.