Sony LinkkBuds S LE Audio Battery Life

For any lucky owners of a Sony LinkBuds S and an LE capable Xperia, you are able to try out the new LC3 codec. LE Audio and LC3 is supposed to be an improvement on the current SBC codec in terms of quality, latency and battery life. But are we seeing these improvements after the update?

While the current firmware only adds the beta version of LE Audio, it still is something. I have yet to see anyone perform any real world battery test to see if LC3 is more efficient, but Sony did update their battery life table in the guide to include LC3.

From the table, we can see the battery life is nothing to get excited about so far. It is slightly less than SBC, the codec it replaces. Of course, this is still the beta version of LE Audio, so perhaps once it is final, we will see an improvement. I am not expecting anything like 2 times the battery life, but perhaps 20% more, maybe 25% is a realistic expectation.

So once we have final firmware, hopefully these numbers increase. Maybe we could get 1-2 hours more than SBC with the same settings, but this is only a guess.

Turning to latency, it appears that there is an improvement. According to user jrharbort from reddit,

“LE Audio is a Literal game changer with regards to latency.”

While not a technical result, if it is noticeable in a game, I suspect there is improvement. Hopefully we will have an actual measurement soon.

As for quality, that is very subjective, so for some it may sound better, for others the same, and the rest worse. Unfortunately I do not have a new Xperia device, so I will not be able to compare LC3 and SBC, but maybe in the future.

When the final LE audio firmware will be released is unknown, hopefully by the Fall, but Sony has not released any details about this.

As for any users who have updated their LinkBuds S and their Xperias to test out LE Audio, what are you impressions? Are you seeing better battery life? What about latency? Drop your thoughts below.