Quick Summary
Audioscenic and partners, including Philips, have created a reference design to convince soundbar manufacturers to use its 3D spatial audio technology.
You can’t buy it yet, but the tech could be in your next soundbar.
Audioscenic has built a soundbar it says is the perfect solution for gamers who want the best of both worlds – the thump of speakers and the clarity of headphones.
It’s worked with Philips and NXP Semiconductors to show off the first reference design, and it promises an audio experience no other soundbar can deliver.
The key here is Audioscenic’s Amphi Hi-D spatial audio system, which we first reported on last year. It’s a beamforming technology that adjusts the audio signals going to each speaker to help position them in a three-dimensional space.
It works much like the head tracking you get in the best earbuds and headphones, but with all the oomph of a proper soundbar.
Could this be the best gaming soundbar you can’t buy?
The soundbar is a reference design, not a product at present.
It’s for manufacturers, who Audioscenic and its partners hope will be so impressed they’ll want to make their own versions. To that end, the design is being shown off at the Computex trade show in Taipei.
The design uses speakers, microphones and some powerful processing to deliver consistent 3D audio as you move around the space in your games, and it uses Philips’ BeClear technology to maintain consistent voice quality.
To do that, it removes some of the in-game audio so you can hear voices clearly. That processing is carried out by a Quad Arm Cortex-A53 running at 1.8GHz per core handling 8-channel audio input.
According to Audioscenic’s co-founder Marcos Simon, it’s a game-changer for gamers: “Philips BeClear running on the NXP chipset with position-adaptive multichannel Hi-D sound unpacks the cluster of game audio and voice, providing remarkable immersive sound and voice clarity without the disruption of noise and echoes.”
Audioscenic is demonstrating the prototype this week, and you can find out more about its technology on the company’s website.
