The full suite of Fraunhofer's technologies are enabling the creation, transmission, and experience of an entirely new universe of immersive, and high quality sound. MPEG-H Audio has made Next Generation Audio a reality and enables sophisticated broadcast and streaming functionalities as well as outstanding creative opportunities. It is the underlying codec for a broad range of customizable user experiences. In Brazil and South Korea, the technology is on the air 24/7 and it is the base of the 360 Reality Audio immersive music streaming services offered by Amazon Music Unlimited, Tidal and others.
At CES 2023, Fraunhofer will show latest impressions of the World Cup experience with MPEG-H Audio from Globo, Latin America’s largest media group. The main highlights are an LG TV set with an integrated MPEG-H Audio user interface and MediaTek’s Pentonic Smart TV Chip enabling MPEG-H Audio. The experience is complemented with the support of MPEG-H Audio HDMI passthrough for the reproduction of immersive sound over the MPEG-H Audio enabled soundbar Sennheiser Ambeo Plus.
Together with Amazon, Fraunhofer brings an Audi e-tron equipped with a production 3D sound system to CES 2023, to demonstrate 360 Reality Audio in-car immersive music streaming. Thanks to the fixed seating positions and acoustic characteristics of cars, all passengers can be enveloped by an immersive sound field exactly as intended by the music creatives.
Another technology highlight will be Fraunhofer's Cingo, enabling truly immersive sound on headphones. Cingo delivers best-in-class audio quality and is easy on the hardware, making it an optimal solution for DSPs integrated in mobile devices or even headphones, where processing power and power consumption are major concerns. When fed with head-tracking data, Cingo can create an even more realistic immersive experience. At CES, Fraunhofer IIS will show the state-of-the-art binauralizer with its ideal companion, the Next Generation Audio Codec MPEG-H Audio.
upHear Smart Speaker System
In the upHear Experience Room, CES visitors will experience a new ultra-flexible, smart speaker solution, which turns individual speakers into clusters that unite to create an immersive audio experience from any type of content. The system can automatically adapt the rendering to an arbitrary number of smart speakers at random speaker positions. This means that restrictions regarding the aesthetic positioning of the speakers are now a thing of the past.
And the AI based upHear Microphone Processing technology is designed to significantly improve the speech capturing capabilities of professional and consumer devices. It can extract speech while suppressing a large variety of noise types that can occur during audio calls and video recordings in indoor and outdoor environments. The advanced low-complexity AI-based noise reduction algorithm from Fraunhofer is deployable on edge devices and in the cloud and has low power consumption. At CES, visitors to the Fraunhofer booth will be the first to experience the cutting-edge technology.
The Latest Codecs
Another key focus for Fraunhofer IIS at CES 2023 will be to demonstrate and expand adoption of the latest advanced and highly efficient audio codecs. Particularly with all the momentum around improving the quality of music streaming experiences and wireless audio transmission.
xHE-AAC, the latest generation of the AAC codec family, is the ideal solution for today’s audio and video streaming services – be it movies, music, audiobooks, podcasts or digital radio. With a stereo bitrate range from 12 kbit/s to 500 kbit/s and higher, as well as improved speech quality and stereo imaging, xHE-AAC offers improved sound quality. Its mandatory MPEG-D DRC loudness and dynamic range control and seamless bitrate adjustment using DASH and HLS guarantees the best user experience in any playback situation. xHE-AAC decoding is natively supported in Android, Fire OS, iOS, and Windows. At CES 2023, Fraunhofer is introducing xHE-AAC encoding of live broadcasts and events to complement its existing file-based encoding and we will demonstrate xHE-AAC playback on the Xbox.
Also on display at CES will be LC3, the mandatory codec for the recently adopted Bluetooth Low Energy audio profiles, and LC3plus, the codec that enhances the already excellent performance of LC3 by supporting best-in-class high resolution audio and lower delay modes down to 2.5ms frame size, while providing additional robustness against packet loss. LC3plus has recently been certified for the Hi-Res Audio Wireless Logo of the Japanese Audio Society. Visitors to the Fraunhofer booth will be able to hear the difference that LC3plus makes and see the first implementation of LC3plus into a high-resolution streaming system: the BeoLab 28 speakers by Bang & Olufsen.
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