The year may be drawing to a close, but trade show season is carefully starting. Naturally, safety is always the first priority and so we happily supported all the creative digital formats show organizers came up with. Nevertheless, we are very excited to be able to meet in person again and look forward to CES 2022 in Las Vegas.
We would be happy happy to meet you at CES because some things you have to see and hear live to really believe them. You can book a meeting with our experts here or just stop by at our booth 17093 at CES Las Vegas, January 5-8 2022. At one of the world’s most relevant technology events, we will showcase our cutting-edge technologies, their integration into sophisticated products, and our partnerships that help advance the world of sound.
World Premiere: upHear Smart Speaker Rendering Solution
We will demonstrate our ultra-flexible upHear smart speaker rendering solution. It turns individual smart speakers into clusters, which together create an immersive audio experience from any type of content. The system has the ability to automatically adapt the rendering to an arbitrary number of smart speakers of varying sizes, speaker positions, and listening situations. In combination with spatial audio content delivered through immersive music services such as MPEG-H based 360 Reality Audio, upHear smart speaker rendering brings compelling 3D audio to any home.
The Fraunhofer upHear Immersive Audio Virtualizer is a codec-agnostic audio post-processing technology that brings authentic and enveloping 3D sound to mass-market consumer devices such as soundbars and smart speakers. At CES, we will be demonstrating a new compact immersive soundbar rendering solution.
The Fraunhofer upHear Spatial Audio Capturing algorithm has been designed to significantly improve the sound capture capabilities of professional and consumer 360° cameras and mobile devices using built-in microphones.
The upHear Voice Quality Enhancement is a microphone processing technology that can be integrated into any voice-enabled ecosystem. The software is designed to optimize human-machine interactions and hands-free full duplex VoIP communication using built-in microphones. By removing noise and interfering sounds from the microphone signals, it extracts the user’s voice and restores intelligibility even in demanding acoustic environments. The software library can be integrated into mass-market consumer devices (e.g. mobile devices, smart speakers, soundbars or TV sets, and audio/video conferencing solutions.
In addition to this, we will also show all our successful 4th-generation audio technologies:
MPEG-H Audio: Personalized and Immersive Sound for Broadcast and Streaming
With MPEG-H, Next-Generation Audio is already a reality: Broadcasters and immersive music streaming providers around the globe count on it for their services. In Brazil and South Korea, MPEG-H Audio is on the air 24/7 and Sony’s immersive 360 Reality Audio music streaming services are based on MPEG-H Audio. At CES, you can listen to a 3D audio experience that perfectly matches your preferences either on a soundbar or on an immersive loudspeaker setup – all combined with the possibility to personalize the sound by either choosing from presets or by creating your own settings.
Fraunhofer Cingo turns smartphones and tablets into true immersive sound theaters, enabling users to watch movies and listen to music in enveloping 3D sound even while on the move. Cingo, in combination with MPEG-H Audio, delivers an immersive audio experience on mobile devices with any pair of headphones or the device’s built-in stereo speakers. Listen to the technology in action at CES.
xHE-AAC: Netflix’s Choice for Adaptive AV Streaming and the Standard for Digital Radio
Say goodbye to interrupted or buffering audio and video streams: xHE-AAC offers maximum coding efficiency with a stereo bitrate range from 12 kbit/s to 500 kbit/s and higher. Combined with seamless bitrate adjustment using DASH and HLS, as well as mandatory MPEG-D DRC volume and dynamic range adjustment, xHE-AAC offers the best user experience for any content and in any environment. xHE-AAC decoding is natively supported in Android OS 9 and higher, Amazon Fire OS 7 and Apple iOS 13. It has recently been licensed to Microsoft and Facebook/Meta and is used by Netflix for their streams to Android mobile devices.
At CES, you can not only listen to xHE-AAC but also learn more about our new a web-based testing service that developers and manufacturers can use to check their implementations of the xHE-AAC audio codec for compliance with MPEG standards. In addition we will have a live demonstration of the MainConcept FFmpeg plugin supporting xHE-AAC.
LC3/LC3plus: High-quality Audio for the Entire Communication Ecosystem
The low complexity of the LC3/LC3plus codecs meet the requirements of wireless communication platforms such as Bluetooth, DECT, and VoIP terminals. By reducing the required bit rate by about 50 per cent compared to older codecs, LC3 and LC3plus enable energy-saving services that allow for longer battery life or the development of smaller products. Thanks to the flexible codec design, applications are not limited to voice services, but can also be extended to high-quality music streaming. At the same time, the codec operates with low coding delay, low computational complexity, and small memory requirements.
Learn more about LC3/LC3plus at our booth and experience the quality of a phone call using LC3plus.
Header image: © Consumer Technology Association