Fraunhofer Cingo and upHear Now Integrated with Tymphany's Peerless Flow DSP

December 15 2023, 01:10
The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS), headquartered in Erlangen, Germany, and Tymphany have partnered to provide state-of-the-art spatial audio solutions to audio manufacturers. The two companies have worked together to integrate Fraunhofer's audio processing suites and audio technologies into Flow DSP, Tymphany's own DSP platform and design framework which allows creating immersive audio features in new audio products.
 

As a prominent audio design and manufacturing powerhouse, Tymphany continues to expand from its speaker manufacturing origins into complete systems including audio electronics, amplifiers and DSP. Aside from a thriving component business, the company provides ODM services, serving a wide range of consumer and professional audio manufacturers, as well as the automotive audio industry, with its own solutions and engineering services.

This allows Tymphany to serve a growing number of companies that do not have the capabilities to develop their own in-house audio technologies. For brands, in-house development also results in a long development cycle, recognizing this can be a complex and time-consuming process, requiring specialized expertise, technology, and increasingly DSP coding.

With this new partnership with Fraunhofer IIS, Tymphany is now able to offer audio manufacturers something that is increasingly on demand, which are processing solutions for immersive sound, binaural spatialization, and audio enhancement. Tymphany is now able to offer Fraunhofer's Cingo and upHear suites, being able to add breakthrough tuning features on target products with a simple drag-and-drop interface. 

Tymphany is creating an ecosystem where software and hardware platforms meet to unleash product potentials that were previously unthinkable. Fraunhofer IIS has joined the endeavor, seamlessly integrating their innovative audio processing and enhancement technologies into the Tymphany Peerless Flow DSP environment (pictured below).
 

Flow DSP was purposely created as a platform that streamlines product design, reduces time to market, and eliminates the need for DSP coding. Benefiting from Tymphany's vast engineering experience, Flow DSP features a complete library of algorithms, wide chipset support, and a graphical tool that allows developers to create unique audio products quickly.

Originally created with mobile platforms and VR/AR applications in mind, Fraunhofer's Cingo is now a flexible suite that delivers life-like dynamic spatial audio to a variety of consumer products and applications. Its minimal resource demands and rich customization options make it ideal for small and energy-efficient systems such as hearables. Encompassing binaural audio processing, loudness optimization, and equalization, Cingo also creates an immersive surround sound experience reminiscent of the cinema, particularly because it supports a variety of head-tracking sensors. 

Flexible and convenient, the "virtual surround sound" technology works with any pair of regular headphones or stereo speakers. With Cingo, each audio channel can be presented as a virtual sound source, for instance as a loudspeaker in a listening room, in such a way that it is heard from a specific location and distance. In addition to supporting stereo or surround content, Cingo also supports rendering of 3D audio content with formats that add a height dimension to the sound image, such as 5.1+4 and 7.1+4. It even provides the option of placing an arbitrary number of sound objects anywhere in a virtual space around the listener.
As to the Fraunhofer upHear technology family, this is focused on enhancing the sound quality of microphone and loudspeaker signals in consumer electronics. upHear Voice Quality Enhancement provides crystal clear voice quality letting users choose what they do and don’t want to hear, while upHear's Immersive Audio Virtualizer upgrades the performance of loudspeaker-equipped devices, including upmixing to an immersive soundscape, regardless of the audio format.

These Fraunhofer IIS technologies complement perfectly Tymphany's 5-in-1 holistic approach to integrate transducer, amplifier, DSP/software, acoustic system design and mechanical solutions to create best-in-class audio systems. Tymphany has vertically integrated R&D and manufacturing facilities in Europe, US, and Asia, with a workforce of 6000 highly skilled employees, and 700 engineers.

"We have always envisioned integrating the best audio technology into Flow DSP. The experience of working with the Fraunhofer team has always been excellent, and their cutting-edge technologies have consistently impressed us. We firmly believe that Fraunhofer Cingo and upHear are the perfect products to incorporate into our Flow DSP and will allow us to penetrate the ever-growing spatial and immersive audio market," says Hong Lam, Director of Software Solutions at Tymphany.

Tymphany will be demonstrating this integration together with a range of products and technology demos at CES 2024 in Las Vegas (January 9-12). Flow DSP is licensable worldwide to manufacturers via Peerless by Tymphany.

To arrange a demonstration at CES 2024, email Ryan Lu.
www.tymphany.com
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About Joao Martins
Since 2013, Joao Martins leads audioXpress as editor-in-chief of the US-based magazine and website, the leading audio electronics, audio product development and design publication, working also as international editor for Voice Coil, the leading periodical for... Read more

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