[jonsmirl]

I suspect the main reason they created a new codec is to collect a few billion in royalties.

The most obvious choice here was to allow MP3 as a codec choice, but the patents are all expired on MP3 so that's not a revenue source. Doing that would have avoided recoding for most music.

Every Bluetooth chip I've seen has enough CPU to decode any of these codecs. The only question would be power consumption during decoding.

[rasz]

You arent wrong. Look at Dolby and their clever injections into every new standard despite both HDMI and Bluray already provisioning uncompressed LPCM 7.1 channel audio.

[Kirby64]

Sure, most Bluetooth chips CAN decode most codecs... but it's a matter of power efficiency. If you're trying to make things as efficient as possible, you don't want something that can decode a bunch of different codecs. More specialized means it should be more efficient.

[makomk]

In practice, these codecs are all going to be decoded in firmware on a DSP anyway - while the hardware is optimized for efficient implementation of algorithms like this, which one doesn't matter so much. Also, LC3 seems to have roughly the same computational complexity on one as Opus based on the figures I've seen, and about the same quality too.

I have a distinct suspicion that in reality the only relevant feature LC3 has which Opus lacks is that it ensures a nice ongoing stream of licensing money for the Fraunhofer Institute and Ericsson, who designed it and worked to get it into the standard.