Sonical and Sigma Connectivity Accelerate Hearables Product Development

Sonical, the company pioneering a fully integrated approach for the product development of headphones and hearables, with a real-time operating system that allows consumers to load their own apps has confirmed a development partnership with Sigma Connectivity, the leading Swedish technology design and engineering house. Sigma will help Sonical accelerate the market transition to Headphone 3.0 and the adoption of user driven wearable audio devices.

PSB Speakers, together with hearables start-up Sonical and audio codecs specialists MQA, announced a partnership that intends to define a new category of high-resolution audio headphones. The collaboration is aimed at creating true hifi headphones and smart earbuds, combining MQA's SCL6 high resolution wireless audio transmission and Sonical’s CosmOS platform. Planned for release under the PSB Speakers brand by Q1 2024, the resulting products will be the first headphones to feature Sonical’s ear computing platform, enabling a variety of apps and software upgrades.

Voicemod, a company from Valencia, Spain, specializing in voice effects and interactive voice modification experiences, is enabling Bragi’s new audio platform to incorporate voice modulation capabilities into smart earbuds and headsets for mobile, console, and handheld devices without tethering to a PC. The Voicemod-enabled B2B software solution integration with Bragi allows headphone OEMs to include untethered, hands-free, real-time voice augmentation features.

CEVA, the leading licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies, and Bragi GmbH, the hearables pioneer from Munich, Germany, announced a strategic collaboration to drive a new class of hearable devices where the user experience is customizable via the industry’s first hearable app store and the new Bragi 4 operating system. Target devices include headsets, hearing aids, True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds and a host of other smart audio devices for the consumer and the smart home.

With the release of the Android P beta 3 preview, Fraunhofer IIS announces a new version of the popular FDK library which has been a part of Android since 2012. The FDK2 version will bring several new technologies to Android OEMs, service providers and developers, including xHE-AAC for video and music delivery down to 12kbit/s for stereo sound and MPEG-D DRC dynamic range control for better listening in noisy environments. An important update for a very fragmented platform.