I know this is most likely a waste of my time but wanted to see if anyone knew what CODEC was being used for Bluetooth on our ML system? I usually stream music from Tidal and was looking at my cell phone CODEC options. The Default setting is SBC for me with options for others such as AAC, AptX, LDAC and so forth. Is there any way to find out what the default is and if it can be changed? I looked through the entertainment system manual but found nothing that mentioned this. I also looked at my Bluetooth settings in my car.

 

It's not super new. I have a very old phone running Bluetooth 4.2, and the car is able to communicate freely with it for both calls and music. Also, on page 50 of the Nav manual, a screen from the car is depicted that says this: "Supported Profiles: HFP, SPP, OPP, PBAP, A2DP, AVRCP, MAP". Sorry if I'm answering a different question than you're asking.

 

I'm fully aware of codecs and I'm not saying its new! HFP, SPP, OPP, PBAP, A2DP, AVRCP, MAP are different functions of Bluetooth and do different things. It doesn't answer my question though and I did see this in the manual. Thanks for trying to answer the question though.

 

Oops, sorry to misspeak. When I said "new," I meant the Bluetooth protocol used in my phone is old. This became a real problem for me recently when I bought a fitness band and only then discovered that it used Bluetooth 5.0 and was therefore a useless brick to me because my phone couldn't communicate with it.

 

Per the 2022 LEXUS ES250,ES300H,ES350 NAVIGATION AND MULTIMEDIA SYSTEM OWNER'S MANUAL the Bluetooth audio profile supported is "A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) Ver. 1.0 (Recommended: Ver. 1.3)". If you go to the Bluetooth Specifications and Test Documents List and look at the "Advanced Audio Distribution Profile 1.3.2" specification you'll find there's 4 mandatory audio CODECs required for support the 1.3 version: SBC, MPEG-1,2 Audio, MPEG-2,4 AAC, and ATRAC Family. (From what I can gather ATRAC Family.CODEC format is a Sony proprietary format.) The spec does allow for support of audio CODECs beyond the mandatory but exactly how the additional CODEC support is communicated will require a deeper dive into Bluetooth documentation library.

You might also find from this What’s the Difference Between Bluetooth A2DP and aptX? article of interest:
I think the 728kbit/s maximum applies to pre 5.0 version Bluetooth since the maximum bandwidth pre 5.0 was 1 mbit/s. version 5.0 upped that to 2 mbit/s but I haven't seen anything indicating the current generation ESs supporting Bluetooth version 5 or greater.

 

A correct implementation of Bluetooth 5 is supposed to be backward compatible to ealier versions. Either the fitness band engineers screwed up the implementation or perhaps they got the implementation right but required a Bluetooth profile that your older phone didn't support.

 

Phone was Apple's, so it sure wasn't that the phone was using something non-mainstream exotic. But thanks for sharing that. All I know is, no communication happened until I downgraded to an older version of the band.