Manual confirms Sony WH-1000XM4 does not support aptX codecs

Sony’s upcoming WH-1000XM4 headset is unlikely to get support for Qualcomm’s aptX and aptX-HD codecs. The published user manual of the headphones lacks support for this.

The American telecom watchdog FCC has, among other things, published photos and the user manual of the headphones. It is not available to everyone, but the PDF can be found here.

The manual shows which codecs the WH-1000XM4 supports. That’s just aac, ldac, and sbc, but not aptX and aptX codecs. Those are codecs from Qualcomm, but Sony has switched to chips from MediaTek for the XM4, according to The Walkman Blog.

The manual also shows how the XM4 supports ldac up to 96Khz with a bitrate of 990Kbit/s. In previous rumours, information appeared that the XM4 supports DSEE Extreme, Sony’s proprietary technology for upscaling compressed audio.

Sony has not yet officially announced the successor to the popular WH-1000XM3. That is expected to happen sometime in the coming days.