CUI Devices’ Audio Group announced a new line of medical speakers designed to meet the alarm signal requirements of IEC 60601-1-8. The CDSM and CMSM models feature resonant frequencies up to 400 Hz and a smooth frequency response with fluctuations no more than ±15 dB, making them ideal for supporting IEC 60601 medical designs. Available with a variety […]
Audio
AM radio in cars presents an engineering dilemma
Design engineers are caught between a push to drop AM radios from cars and the radio industry’s pushback. It hasn’t received much attention among all the other news (mostly bad, some good), but there’s some momentum in the U.S. Congress to mandate the inclusion of AM radio receivers in cars. Among all the other issues […]
Las Vegas Sphere spatial audio technology
The Sphere’s immersive spatial audio system is powered by 167,000 amplifier channels and sophisticated multilayer speaker arrays. This FAQ begins with a review of the amplifier technology, looks at the structure of the speaker arrays, and closes with the audio beamforming technology used to create spatial audio in the Sphere. The 167,000 channels of amplification […]
What are the computational requirements of immersive audio?
There are several ways to implement immersive audio, each with different computational and hardware needs. Calculation of the head-related transfer function (HRTF) is an important aspect of deploying immersive audio. This FAQ begins by detailing what an HRTF is, looks at an open-source program for calculating HRTF, and then considers how cameras and inertial measurement […]
What’s the difference between object- and channel-based audio?
Immersive audio uses various channel- and object-based techniques to deliver a high-quality listening experience. There are three general categories of spatial audio: channel-based audio (CBA), object-based audio (OBA), and scene-based audio (SBA) — that’s the next generation of OBA. CBA is the simplest form of spatial audio, but it’s not immersive. The basic form of […]
What codecs are there for immersive and 3D audio?
Immersive audio is a three-dimensional (3D) sound field created by combining lateral and overhead speakers. A variety of industry standard and custom codecs are available for implementing immersive audio. This FAQ reviews the operation of the MPEG-H Audio (universal immersive audio coding) codec and the still-under-development MPEG-I Immersive Audio (compressed representation for virtual and augmented […]