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Bluetooth 4.0, Apt-x, and the latest gen smartphones: no more hard wires?

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#1 ·
I've been a big fan of Bluetooth since its initial launch, but it's always been a mediocre performer. Between compression technologies yielding low bitrates and poor marketing, bluetooth seems like it's only ever been a solution for convenience and not performance (and it's no wonder there's not much discussion about it on DIYMA).

In the past year or two, all of that seems to be changing with the smartphone boom and the technology is now mature enough (version 4.0+) and ubiquitous enough (apt-x compression is used on a lot of the latest phones) to start getting serious consideration to replace any hard-wire stereo lines from phones/ipods/media players into our systems, so I'm curious to see who's experimenting with it. For a great read on the technology, check out this PDF. The article is a bit dated, but it does a great job explaining the compression technologies in place. From my research it seems very difficult to find information on wither the A2DP bandwidth numbers quoted in the PDF are still accurate (couldn't even find it on bluetooth.org's site!), so does anyone know what the latest and greatest versions of Bluetooth support?

Anyway, I'm currently running the previous iteration of Blackberry's Stereo Bluetooth Gateway, and it's just a module in my center console that runs a 3.5mm to RCA to my Bitone's aux input:



It's done a decent job of simplifying operation (the best, from what I've read -- just get in the car and start playing music and it remembers/auto-connects to my phone), but I'm getting very curious about how much things will improve as I bump up to a BT4 phone + BT4 gateway. Last I checked there are a couple of Bluetooth 4.0 units floating around and the HTC Stereoclip seems to be the best option. Has anyone used it or any similar products on a nice setup? If so, what have your results been?
 
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#3 ·
I don't know a lot about Bluetooth other than it's popularity is growing rapidly. I am surprised that there have not been more responses to this thread though.
 
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