Everything you need to know about Auracast

The revolutionary Bluetooth audio-sharing tech that promotes personal audio experiences in public spaces

“Welcome to the year of the whores” has to be up there as one of the best real-time TV subtitle whoopsies of them all, as the BBC’s Tina Daheley ushered in the Chinese Year of the Horse in 2014. Close behind it is surely presenter Dan Walker referring to the English seaside town Cromer as famous for its “crap” (instead of crabs), and Manchester United midfielder Adnan Januzaj once being subtitled as “Janet Jazz Jazz Jam”.

Last year, the What Hi-Fi? team was watching Formula 1 on a pub TV and noticed how many words the subtitles got wrong (though none to the same bemusement as those notorious blunder examples), or just plainly missed. Live subtitles provide an indispensable service for the deaf and hard of hearing, of course, and we’re not at all here to bash the efforts of hard-working captioners. But that shoddy motor race-watching pub experience could be a thing of the past with the arrival of a new broadcast audio technology that promises to make experiencing audio content in public spaces much better. Say hello to Auracast.

Auracast is one of the features that the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) – a global community of 36,000 companies responsible for setting Bluetooth technology standards – has included in its latest specifications for the Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) Audio standard – which also, by the way, introduced the LC3 codec for supposedly better-quality audio at lower data rates and increased power efficiency compared with the ‘standard’ SBC Bluetooth.