CES 2023

Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) / January 04, 2023 - January 08, 2023

CES 2023

Central Hall #15915

To bring the latest technological advancements in audio into consumer electronics has always been the focus of our work. We want to make great audio experiences easy and accessible, 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 short time-to-market. Visit us at booth 15915 in LVCC Central Hall and learn more about all our offerings.

^{MPEG-H Audio: Personalized and Immersive Sound for Broadcast and Streaming}

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, the technology is on the air 24/7 and it is the basis of Sony's immersive 360 Reality Audio music streaming services. The immersive music tracks, available from providers such as Amazon Music, Tidal, 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 Audio, 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.

^{Automotive Audio - Driving Immersive Sound}

Join Amazon Music and Fraunhofer IIS for a demonstration of 360 Reality Audio in-car immersive music streaming at the Fraunhofer booth. Together, we will demonstrate how immersive and authentic 360 Reality Audio music can sound in a vehicle. During the live demo, an Audi e-tron equipped with a production 3D sound system will be used to play immersive music. CES visitors will be the first to be able to experience Amazon Music’s 360 Reality Audio Service in an automotive environment and to discover the spectacular opportunities this brings to the automotive world. 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.

To showcase how the legacy stereo content experience can be improved, Fraunhofer IIS also presents its proven Sonamic Panorama upmix solution, which creates a unique and convincing surround sound impression. The mature technology has already been implemented into several serial models of renowned car manufacturers.

attractive woman listen radio in her car — © bertys30 - Fotolia

^{Fraunhofer Cingo: For Truly Immersive Sound on Headphones}

Cingo brings immersive sound to everyday life through the convenience of using your mobile device. While Cingo offers best-in-class audio quality, it 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 3D immersive experience by responding to the user’s head movement with minimal latency. As a state-of-the-art binauralizer, it is the ideal companion for Next Generation Audio Codecs such as MPEG-H Audio.

Enjoy an interactive demo of Cingo, playing back MPEG-H content on mobile devices on our booth.

^{Fraunhofer upHear Experience Room: Smart Speaker Rendering Solutions}

At CES 2023, Fraunhofer IIS will demonstrate its ultra-flexible upHear Smart Speaker System. Smart speakers equipped with this technology enable consumers to turn individual speakers into clusters of speakers that unite to 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 at arbitrary speaker positions. For the user, this means that they no longer have restrictions regarding the aesthetic positioning of the speakers as they do, for example, with a 5.1 system. In combination with audio content that could be delivered through immersive music services such as MPEG-H/360 Reality Audio, the upHear Smart Speaker System brings compelling 3D audio to any home. The consumer experience is maximized by making the use of an immersive playback system as convenient as possible and allowing consumers to enhance their playback system with several devices of the chosen audio brand.

^{The uphear Family of Audio Processing Technologies}

The upHear Microphone Processing technology has been designed to improve the audio capturing capabilities of professional and consumer devices (e.g., mobile devices, action and 360° cameras, smart speakers and soundbars, audio and video conferencing solutions) using built-in microphones. By removing undesired noises, interfering sounds, and reverberation from the microphone signals, it extracts desired sounds such as speech and music even in demanding acoustic environments. With deep-learning based AI noise reduction algorithms, 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 situations.

The upHear Spatial Audio Capturing additionally provides immersive spatial sound capturing capabilities for speech and music recordings with compact consumer devices such as action cameras and mobile phones. It can render the recorded audio to various spatial sound formats including channel-based formats and higher-order Ambisonics, while providing robustness against undesired sounds such as background noise and wind.

The upHear Voice Quality Enhancement is an extension of the upHear Microphone Processing technology that enables human-machine interaction and hands-free full duplex voice communication using the built-in microphones of embedded devices. It extracts the user’s voice and improves speech intelligibility in challenging acoustic environments by removing undesired echoes, interfering sounds, and reverberation from the microphone signals.

^{Goodbye to interrupted or buffering audio and video streams – thanks to xHE-AAC}

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 will demonstrate xHE-AAC playback on an Xbox.

^{LC3/LC3plus: High-Quality Audio for Bluetooth, VOIP and DECT}

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.

LC3plus has just recently been certified for the Hi-Res Audio Wireless Logo of the Japanese Audio Society.

Learn more about LC3/LC3plus at our booth and experience the quality of our codecs.