[2] It was designed with Bluetooth bandwidth limitations and processing power in mind to obtain a reasonably good audio quality at medium bit rates with low computational complexity.
[8] The patent owners wrote that they allow the free usage of SBC in Bluetooth applications with a goal of boosting the use of this technology.
[10] However, A2DP requires decoders to support higher quality streams, up to 512 kbit/s, and there are some experimental encoders that use this feature: for example, SBC XQ, used by Lineage OS.
[13] With higher bit rate, audio quality is comparable to aptX HD (529 kbit/s).
[10][15] The A2DP test specification (V1.0) contains a reference implementation of the encoder and decoder for the SBC codec.