Ok, I found this hot off the press:
Key points:
In commercial production
One usage case (amongst others) is ‘advanced wearables’
Supports Bluetooth 5.2
and…
“In addition, the SoC has been designed to meet the requirements of LE Audio, enabling audio streaming over Bluetooth Low Energy. LE Audio supports multi-stream synchronized audio for applications such as earbuds, and Audio Sharing, whereby a single audio source can be broadcast to multiple recipients. With an LE Audio- enabled software stack, the nRF5340’s radio can support Isochronous Channels, the Bluetooth 5.2 feature required by LE Audio for streaming. LE Audio also introduces the Low Complexity Communications Codec (LC3), a high-quality, low-power audio compression codec that can run efficiently on the nRF5340. The audio data can be transferred to other parts of the system (for example, AD/DA converters, speakers, and microphones) using the I2S and PDM audio interfaces, which employ the nRF5340’s low-jitter audio PLL clock source.”
Interesting that they say “in addition” when we were wondering whether Bluetooth 5.2 was sufficient in itself for supporting LE Audio.
When they say “with an LE Audio- enabled software stack” I’m guessing that they mean is “with the addition of”.
Anyway what we seem to have here is a hardware platform that is in production and can be used to develop advanced hearables including ones supporting LE audio when updated with a LE audio software stack. Just a sign that things are moving forward.