Audio

TikTok beta tests premium only streaming service

By Peter Cooney / July 20, 2023
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​​​TikTok is attempting to penetrate the already saturated digital music streaming market. The news recently comes as an expansion to beta testing offered in Brazil and Indonesia. According to the news, “TikTok says it’s inviting users in Australia, Mexico and Singapore to participate in the TikTok Music closed beta test starting today.”This is very significant as […]

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Sony and Honda’s “Afeela” car showcases automotive’s high-tech future

By Peter Cooney / July 20, 2023
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This release highlights several high-level trends in automotive. Traditional car makers are coming up against more competition from consumer electronics brands. The smart ones will seek partnerships to remain relevant and to help them catapult ahead of the competition. These partnerships will involve multiple different types of company car OEMs, consumer electronics brands and semiconductor […]

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Shokz enter the TWS market

By Joe Murray / July 4, 2023
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Shokz has just announced its first TWS products with a twist. In a similar vein to how they have attempted to offer a safer solution to earbuds in the past without using audio transparency, their new earbuds offer what they are calling Air Conduction, which seems to be either Beamforming or something very similar. The […]

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Qualcomm S3 Gen 2 Sound Platform Portfolio

By Peter Cooney / July 4, 2023
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​​Qualcomm has announced an update to the Qualcomm S3 Gen 2 Sound platform portfolio, which is optimised for gaming. Latency is perhaps the biggest issue that is holding back widespread adoption of Bluetooth for gaming, many vendors continue to rely on proprietary RF to ensure latency is minimised. SAR Insight has talked about this many times. […]

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Knowles Balanced Armatures Pack High-Fidelity Punch into 21-Driver UE PREMIER IEM

By Peter Cooney / June 27, 2023
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Ultimate Ears’ recent UE Premier in-ear monitor (IEM) headphones boast an impressive 21 drivers per earpiece, “to deliver a signature sound with unparalleled fidelity, control and precision”. It is the trend to add more and more drivers (speakers) to IEM earbuds, but SAR has not seen anything quite so dramatic as 21 per earbud before. On closer inspection […]

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Sunplus and WiSA Technologies Partner to Enable Cost-Effective Atmos Soundbar Applications up to 7.1.4 Configurations

By Peter Cooney / June 22, 2023
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​​​This partnership between WiSA and Sunplus is significant as it speeds up development of Dolby Atmos soundbars by providing what the two stakeholders call the SPA300 SoC Software Development Kit. The development kit leverages WiSA’s expertise in immersive sound technology. There are several brands that supply WiSA certified equipment. The partnership between WiSA and Sunplus should […]

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Sony Music chief talks streaming, short-form, gaming and AI in investor presentation

By Peter Cooney / May 25, 2023
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​Recently there has been coverage of Sony Music CEO, Rob Stringer, making comments on the current state of play for music streaming. As hi-res audio is an area we cover in our Audio Software & IP Service, I thought that this highlights some interesting discussion. Stringer suggests that most streaming services are “watered down by […]

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Unity claim first lossless wireless headphones

By Joe Murray / May 25, 2023
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Swiss headphone company, Unity, has just released a pair of what they are calling the worlds first wireless lossless headphones. The headphones use a proprietary technology called Full-Fidelity that allows the headphones to receive audio which takes advantages of both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to capture audio quality at 24-bit/96kHz. Many would argue that consumer headphones […]

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Head Acoustics offers LE Audio testing environment

By Joe Murray / May 24, 2023
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​Head Acoustics has updated its solutions to support testing of the new Bluetooth LE Audio protocol. LE Audio, while it was announced in January 2020, it is only just come to market in the past year or so. One issue for companies adopting this technology into their portfolio of headphones is the risk of negative […]

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Xiaomi and QQ Music teamed up with Savitech’s LHDC 5.0 to wirelessly release “master tape level” 24bit/192kHz audio quality

By Peter Cooney / May 10, 2023
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This is an interesting story as it demonstrates the importance on hi-res audio in China. Here we see the coming together of a major brand, a major audio streaming service and an audio codec vendor, to help drive hi-res audio to the consumer. QQ audio is one of China’s most popular audio streaming services and has supported […]

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