Your phone is usually attached to your hip (in terms of the recent iPhone 17âs Crossbody Strap, I mean that literally). But in the comfort of your own home when youâre trying to unwind and escape your phone with your favorite music, needing to stay in Bluetooth range for your headphones and wireless earbuds can be a little annoying. Qualcommâs audio engineers are trying to solve that issue by seamlessly switching to Wi-Fi if you travel away from your audio source. Sure, that sounds neat, but the tech implies a future where you wonât even need any other device nearby to listen to your favorite tunes on your AirPods.
I can already hear the whining in the comments. The problem this feature hopes to fix is a very niche use case, but itâs one that could end up in many next-gen wireless earbuds in the near future. I tested out this feature at Snapdragon Summer in Hawaii (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Qualcomm, and Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip), dubbed XPAN for âExpanded Personal Area Network,â with a pair of nonspecific reference wireless earbuds used by Qualcomm. With the feature enabled, the buds work with the phone to detect if the device is in Bluetooth range. If you start walking away, they will automatically switch over to Wi-Fi.
In many ways, the tech is far more interesting than the end result. The wireless earbuds contained a Wi-Fi antenna, though neither the case nor the buds looked much different from what Iâve used in the past. I walked 30 feet away from the phone and back, and I didnât notice any interruptions in the song playing. The phone showed how it was swapping from a P2P (peer-to-peer) connection through various other connection types. A Bluetooth 5.3 connection range is technically close to 33 feet. While that means you wonât lose connection walking from one end of the room to the other, intervening walls orâin my caseâa crowd of bodies could interrupt that signal. XPAN merely expands the range to encompass everywhere thereâs a Wi-Fi signal.
Although wireless earbuds with the technology will be limited to local Wi-Fi, the technology could potentially allow you to listen to your device from âanywhere in the worldâ through a Wi-Fi access point. Dino Bekis, Qualcommâs general manager of connectivity, told me in a Q&A that thereâs no issue with latency on a Wi-Fi connection compared to Bluetooth. Modern wireless earbuds are already so damn good at cutting down on latency even when streaming high-bitrate lossless audio. Wi-Fi networks should be able to handle the 96kHz speeds necessary for lossless. It shouldnât matter if youâre still using Wi-Fi 6 or the modern Wi-Fi 7 standard, either.
âToday, with XPAN, itâs 96kHz 24-bit, but we see that evolving to 192kHz to be truly lossless,â Bekis said.
Qualcomm has talked up Wi-Fi audio connections for the past two years with its previous-gen S7 and S7 Pro platforms. The first wireless earbuds with XPAN built in were the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro released earlier this year. They support the 96kHz standard, though Bekis promised we should see more wireless earbuds soon enough with current or future S7 chips. Audiophiles would still extol the benefits of lossless and minimum latency. Regular folk who just want to listen to their tunes simply care that they need to be within close range of their paired music source. Still, the feature may end up being more useful for taking calls with your wireless earbuds than for listening to music.
Inevitably, it seems our wireless earbuds will become as connected as our phones are today. What that means for music listeners is a future where we connect to Spotify or Apple Music right from our wireless earbudsâ or headphonesâ case, rather than needing to go through a phone. I donât think weâll need to wait long to see more wireless earbuds cases with screens used to control music. Hell, if you were longing for a device as dedicated to music as your old iPod, a Wi-Fi-enabled pair of wireless earbuds could fit the bill. Youâll still have to pay your tithe to your favorite music streaming app, of course.
