The Focal Bathys are a luxury item, with glove-soft lambskin on its earpads and the top of its headband. Where an MQA stream can be as much as 9,216Kbps, Montabonel said, the aptX Adaptive codec could “compress the data to between 279Kbps to 420Kbps.” She also said “a lot of Android devices are limiting USB Audio to 48kHz.” Meanwhile, the Bathys do not support DSD bitstreams at all. While the Bathys support the MQA format, Montabonel said the playback device and/or the codec being could impose limitations by downsampling the signal. While the Bathys have been in development for more than three years, Montabonel told me the engineering team wasn’t able to implement LDAC support before the time came to freeze the electronics, but that Focal hopes to add the feature later. Speaking of Bluetooth (5.1 multipoint in this case, meaning the Bathys can maintain connections to two sources at once), Focal supports the SBC, AAC, aptX, and aptX Adaptive codecs, but not Sony’s excellent LDAC. ![]() Connect the Bathys to your source’s USB-C port, set the button to DAC, and the headphone will handle digital-to-analog conversion.
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