CES 2022: A Bright Sounding Future

We are happy and excited to reconnect with you at the world’s biggest consumer electronics show - CES 2022 in Las Vegas. To bring the latest technological advancements in audio into consumer electronics has always been the focus of our work. We want to make the world sound better, we want to empower consumers to adapt sound to their needs, and we want to cooperate with manufacturers to bring state-of-the-art audio technologies into their products – including in-depth support and fast time-to-market. Visit us at booth 17093 and learn more about all our offerings.

At CES 2022, Fraunhofer will demonstrate its ultra-flexible upHear smart speaker rendering solution for the first time. With upHear smart speaker rendering consumers will be able to turn individual smart speakers into clusters of speakers that together create an immersive audio experience from any type of content. The system has the ability to automatically adapt the rendering to an arbitrary number of smart speakers of varying sizes, speaker positions and listening situations. In combination with spatial audio content delivered through immersive music services. upHear smart speaker rendering brings compelling 3D audio to any home.

With MPEG-H, Next-Generation Audio is already a reality: Broadcasters and immersive music streaming providers around the globe count on it for their services. In Brazil and South Korea, MPEG-H Audio is on the air 24/7 and Sony's immersive 360 Reality Audio music streaming services are based on MPEG-H Audio. The immersive music tracks, available from providers such as Amazon Music Unlimited, Tidal, Deezer, nugs.net and Sony Select, can be enjoyed on mobile devices (with headphones), soundbars, AVRs, smart speakers, and in the car.

Listen to a 3D audio experience that perfectly matches your preferences. With MPEG-H, you can choose from presets or create your own settings. It is now possible, for example, to switch between different languages, adjust the volume of a sports commentator, enhance the dialogue, and choose from several audio description options. All these features contribute to the pristine sound that listeners expect from quality services today.

The Fraunhofer upHear family of sound processing technologies dramatically enhances the audio playback or recording quality of professional and consumer devices.

At CES 2022, Fraunhofer will demonstrate its ultra-flexible upHear Smart Speaker Rendering solution for the first time. With upHear Smart Speaker Rendering consumers will be able to turn individual smart speakers into clusters of speakers that together create an immersive audio experience from any type of content. The system has the ability to automatically adapt the rendering to an arbitrary number of smart speakers of varying sizes, speaker positions and listening situations. In combination with spatial audio content delivered through e.g. immersive music services based on MPEG-H/360 Reality Audio, upHear Smart Speaker Rendering brings compelling 3D audio to any home.

The Fraunhofer upHear Immersive Audio Virtualizer is a codec-agnostic audio post-processing technology that brings authentic and enveloping 3D sound to mass-market consumer devices such as soundbars and smart speakers. At CES, we will be demonstrating a new compact immersive soundbar rendering solution.

The Fraunhofer upHear Spatial Audio Capturing algorithm has been designed to significantly improve the sound capture capabilities of professional and consumer 360° cameras and mobile devices using built-in microphones.

The upHear Voice Quality Enhancement is a microphone processing technology that can be integrated into any voice-enabled ecosystem. The software is designed to optimize human-machine interactions and hands-free full duplex VoIP communication using built-in microphones. By removing noise and interfering sounds from the microphone signals, it extracts the user’s voice and restores intelligibility even in demanding acoustic environments. The software library can be integrated into mass-market consumer devices (e.g. mobile devices, smart speakers, soundbars or TV sets. and audio/video conferencing solutions.  

Fraunhofer Cingo turns smartphones and tablets into true immersive sound theaters, enabling users to watch movies and listen to music in enveloping 3D sound even while on the move.

Cingo is specifically engineered and tuned to offer a stunning immersive spatial impression and at the same time deliver a natural and clear sound - retaining the the intent and production quality of the original mix.

Modern headphones with inbuilt gyro sensors supply headtracking-data that can be used in Cingo. As a result, the sound image adapts naturally to the listener’s head orientation, significantly improving the 3D feeling and spatial precision

Cingo, in combination with MPEG-H Audio, delivers an immersive audio experience on mobile devices with any pair of headphones or the device’s built-in stereo speakers. Listen to the technology in action at CES.

Say goodbye to interrupted or buffering audio and video streams: The latest addition to the AAC codec family provides maximum coding efficiency with a stereo bitrate range from 12 kbit/s to 500 kbit/s and higher. Combined with seamless bitrate adjustment using DASH and HLS, as well as mandatory MPEG-D DRC volume and dynamic range adjustment, xHE-AAC offers the best user experience for any content – whether movies, music, audiobooks or podcasts – and in any environment, at home or on the go. xHE-AAC decoding is natively supported in Android OS 9 and higher, Amazon Fire OS 7 and Apple iOS 13. It has recently been licensed to Microsoft and Facebook/Meta and is used by Netflix for their streams to Android mobile devices. It is also the standard audio codec for the digital radio system DRM.

Fraunhofer also offers a web-based testing service that developers and manufacturers can use to check their implementations of the xHE-AAC^© audio codec for compliance with MPEG standards. The free service can be used to test both encoders and decoders. It is exclusively available at https://test.xhe-aac.com/

The new LC3/LC3plus audio codec was jointly developed by Ericsson and Fraunhofer IIS to address the drawbacks of today's wireless communication platforms. The low complexity of the codec meets the requirements of wireless communication platforms such as Bluetooth, DECT, and VoIP terminals. By reducing the required bit rate by about 50 per cent compared to older codecs, LC3 and LC3plus enable energy-saving services that allow for longer battery life or the development of smaller products. Thanks to the flexible codec design, applications are not limited to voice services, but can also be extended to high-quality music streaming. At the same time, the codec operates with low coding delay, low computational complexity, and small memory requirements.

Learn more about LC3/LC3plus at our booth and experience the quality of a phone call using LC3plus.