I'm not sure I follow what you mean. Of course an ASIC can be designed to maximize the efficiency of any given RF device. I personally have a BLE enabled medica

I'm not sure I follow what you mean. Of course an ASIC can be designed to maximize the efficiency of any given RF device. I personally have a BLE enabled medical device implanted in my chest with a 10+ year battery life. Based on a neat x-ray image I have, it has a single BGA IC, half a dozen ceramic capacitors, what looks like a crystal oscillator, and a couple discrete diodes. My point is that there's inherent energy required to transmit information via radio waves given a specific modulation and framing. Less data takes less energy than more data, and less framing takes less energy than more framing. For the same data rate (digital audio), lower latency requires more power than higher latency because there's more framing overhead. Additionally, because of how noisy the medium is, there's an inherent need for redundancy in the transmitted data, and that redundancy must either be distributed in time or in space. Distributing it in time generally requires less power but inherently adds latency. Distributing it in space means transmitting the signal with more inherent power. That's true whether you use bluetooth or wifi and have an optimized ASIC. The difference between the two is the available modulations and framing. If wifi supports a modulation that's more inherently efficient at transmitting low latency audio data than bluetooth, then it would make sense to implement it. WiFi seemingly isn't designed to do that, though. It's designed to be good at transferring data at orders of magnitude higher data rates, using proportionately higher power. The corresponding framing is designed around that assumption. Legacy bluetooth is terrible, but so is legacy wifi. Presumably, the latest bluetooth standards make use of modern modulations and framing techniques to minimize power consumption and latency appropriate for its use cases. If wifi were strictly better for the same use cases, then the next bluetooth standard would simply be "bluetooth" branding on top of something like wifi-direct.