Here’s an interesting NY Times rundown on BT codecs, including LC3 at the end. The guy says he was formerly marketing director for Dolby and worked on promoting the AAC codec but has no financial interest in Dolby or that technology since he left. He says expect LC3 products in late 2021 or 2022 without saying how he knows. Still looking for original reference I thought I saw. I have seen earlier predictions consistent with everyone’s hopes here.
Edit_Update: Apologies if someone has already published a link to the following PDF elsewhere on the forum but it’s a March, 2020, BT SIG Update to Bluetooth’s plans to take over the world! It shows the predicted and tremendous growth of BT (they hope) in virtually every segment of the economy, including BT Smart Cities! I hope that Phonak will take note (as a potential future Phonak customer vs. ReSound, Widex, Signia, etc) that the predictions show production of BT Classic only devices continuing to seriously decline and predicts that devices that are BT LE only or BT LE plus Classic will be the future market (see page 10 of PDF if included page ref in link doesn’t work). Doesn’t detail how BT LE Audio figures within the BT LE but since BT 5.2 is the latest version of the spec, it’s probably going to be that or higher that’s “BT LE” going forward.
35% of annual shipments by 2024
will be LE single-mode devices
https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020_Market_Update-EN.pdf#page=10
Edit_Update: Potentially the “35% of devices shipped by 2024 BT LE only” - hard to interpret but perhaps it means by 2024 a Phonak Classic BT-only approach won’t work with a lot of devices shipped. Perhaps if the 35% of devices shipped are all other brand HA’s, it won’t matter so much …