What if your wireless headphones (or audio glasses) could stream high-quality, lossless audio that doesn’t cut out when you leave your phone on the charger next to your bed or buried in the couch? Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 is the first to integrate “Wi-Fi 6E micropower” directly into the chip, so they can connect directly to your home Wi-Fi network and from there to the cloud. If that sounds like a familiar promise, it’s probably because Qualcomm promised something similar in 2023 with the “S7 Pro sound platform” and its expanded personal area network (XPAN) technology, saying Wi-Fi earbuds can do what Bluetooth alone can’t. That is, 24-bit 96 kHz lossless audio that doesn’t fit into the limited bandwidth of Bluetooth. But that old Series 7 platform required a separate Wi-Fi chip to give you Wi-Fi headphones, and it looks like that wasn’t a winning formula for getting makers of incredibly small devices to adopt the technology. In fact, we’ve only heard of one: Xiaomi’s Buds 5 Pro 2025, which didn’t launch globally. Now that Wi-Fi no longer requires an additional chip, perhaps the idea can take off. Qualcomm says the Elite is also 30 percent smaller, consumes up to 40 percent less power, and has twice the AI processing capabilities of the previous generation chip, all of which should be music to device makers’ ears. So far, Qualcomm says it’s working with HP on a specific unnamed product, is “working closely with Bose,” and is “pioneering a new category of smart listenable devices” (read: headphones with integrated cameras) with Cleer.
