The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be the SoC for smartphones next year and features something nice in terms of wireless sound….
The average audio enthusiast won’t particularly care which SoC will be used in new high-end smartphones next year. Yet those SoCs (or System On a Chip, the beating heart of modern phones, tablets and more) do in part determine what you will hear over time. And by that we mean that Qualcomm in particular is image-defining for also the audio capabilities of new generations of smartphones and so on. For example, because it introduces new – mostly wireless – techniques for the transmission of audio. Such is the case with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. In theory, this chip makes it possible to send hires sound to headphones. In a quality of up to and including 24 bit /96 kHz.
The combination does it
Only ‘catch’ is that on the receiving end there must also be a Qualcomm chip present in, for example, headphones or active speakers. More specifically, in that case the S7 Pro Gen 1 sound chip is needed. In short: Bluetooth will not be replaced by this technology overnight. But Qualcomm is a very big and – as already mentioned – image-defining player in the field of SoCs for Android devices. So who knows what will happen in the coming years. You should also keep in mind that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be “hot and shiny” next year, but obsolete again in the years to come. You often see that viable technologies do start trickling down to budget products. And so the system becomes more and more accessible.