Sonical and XMOS Develop New UWB/Bluetooth Wireless Audio USB Dongle

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, will partner with XMOS for its Headphone 3.0 demonstrations at CES 2024. The two companies will showcase a first joint development that will greatly enhance wireless audio quality with huge benefits to the feature set in Sonical's roadmap.

The Audio Engineering Society created a new Task Group to develop a new standard for Ultra Wideband (UWB) high resolution, low latency audio. During the 155th AES New York 2023 Convention (October 25-27), a dedicated workshop will detail the potential of UWB for audio, and this new AES effort. Titled "UWB – A New Wireless Tech in the Future of Pro Audio" the panel will include Jackie Green (UWB Alliance), Jonny McClintock (AntennaWare/Audio Codecs), Gary Spittle (Sonical), Torbev Sonderskov (Lenbrook), and Alexis Bizalion (Qorvo).

Lenbrook Corp., the privately-owned Canadian audio company that owns NAD Electronics, PSB Speakers, Bluesound, Bluesound Professional, and BluOS, has acquired the assets of UK-based company MQA. The deal adds significant audio patents and codecs to Lenbrook’s IP portfolio, including MQA's high-resolution audio encoding and the latest SCL6 Scalable Codec for wireless audio applications, which is implemented in the upcoming line of PSB headphones and earbuds.

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.