SoundFi Wants You to Go to the Movies and Use Headphones

While Movie theaters are investing millions to upgrade their sound systems to deliver the best possible immersive audio experiences, there is a new company that thinks that you should wear headphones while watching the movie... And they are not selling the headphones. SoundFi is a new "in-theater" mobile app designed to provide 3D binaural audio on headphones, and their new technology is being showcased during the theatrical release of Columbia Pictures' The Equalizer 2 at participating cinemas in LA.

The European Broadcasting Union EBU and Fraunhofer IIS have successfully conducted the first trial for live production of immersive and interactive sound using the MPEG-H TV Audio System at the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Lisbon, Portugal. For the trial, the Fraunhofer sound engineers installed a height dimension to the impressive microphone setup in the Altice Arena, enabling them to produce an immersive and personalized audio mix live. Broadcasters and sound experts present at the venue could experience the enveloping and interactive MPEG-H sound.

3D/VR audio specialists, 3D Sound Labs, announced the availability of the latest version of its VR Audio Kit, an Ambisonics SDK optimized for 360° mobile players. This technology has been jointly presented in September at IBC 2016 in Amsterdam together with solution provider for content delivery Viaccess Orca. The demo of a 360° VR mobile video player with High-Order Ambisonics (HOA) audio, running on a smartphone, was playing a 4K 360° video along with a compressed 3rd order Ambisonics audio stream.

At Gamescom 2016 Sennheiser unveiled a range of new gaming products. The audio specialist is launching the GSX 1000 and GSX 1200 PRO audio amplifiers for PC and Mac – the very first to feature an advanced 7.1 positional gaming audio algorithm developed by Sennheiser with the needs of core gamers in mind. Sennheiser is also launching the GSP 300, a new closed acoustic headset from the brand's new range of gaming headsets.

Google, the company that makes a business out of anything that’s Open Source, announced its new Omnitone project, a platform that they say “brings spatial audio to the web in order to provide more immersive VR experiences, using only the Web Audio API.” The platform uses all the known spatial audio, ambisonics and binaural techniques, including several existing open source efforts, now released on a set of integrated tools that enable exploring immersive audio or spatial audio directly on a web browser.