Discover tomorrow’s media technologies at CES 2023

Products and solutions developed by Fraunhofer IIS are indispensable in any field of the audio landscape: We want to make great audio experiences easy and accessible, and we want to cooperate with manufacturers to bring state-of-the-art audio technologies into their products. The current generation of Fraunhofer technologies enables the creation, transmission, and experience of an entirely new universe of immersive and high quality sound. Visit us at CES 2023, which takes place in Las Vegas from January 5 to 8, at our booth 15915 in the Central Hall.

At the core of the new sound: MPEG-H Audio

MPEG-H Audio has made Next Generation Audio a reality and enables sophisticated broadcast and streaming functionalities as well as outstanding creative opportunities. It is the underlying codec for a broad range of customizable user experiences. In Brazil and South Korea, the technology is on the air 24/7 and it is the base of the 360 Reality Audio immersive music streaming services offered by Amazon Music Unlimited, Tidal and others.

At CES 2023, Fraunhofer will show latest impressions of the World Cup experience with MPEG-H Audio from Globo, Latin America’s largest media group. The main highlights are an LG TV set with an integrated MPEG-H Audio user interface and MediaTek’s Pentonic Smart TV Chip enabling MPEG-H Audio. The experience is complemented with the support of MPEG-H Audio HDMI passthrough for the reproduction of immersive sound over the MPEG-H Audio enabled soundbar Sennheiser Ambeo Plus.

Driving Immersive Sound

Together with Amazon, Fraunhofer brings an Audi e-tron equipped with a production 3D sound system to the show to demonstrate 360 Reality Audio in-car immersive music streaming. 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.

Fraunhofer Cingo: Truly Immersive Sound on Headphones

Cingo brings immersive sound to life on your headphones. It delivers best-in-class audio quality and 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 headtracking-data, Cingo can create an even more realistic immersive experience. Fraunhofer IIS shows the state-of-the-art binauralizer with its ideal companion, the Next Generation Audio Codec MPEG-H Audio.

Creating the best sound: upHear Smart Speaker System by Fraunhofer

In the upHear Experience Room, visitors experience the ultra-flexible smart speaker solution, which turns individual speakers into clusters that unite to create an immersive audio experience from any type of content. The system can automatically adapt the rendering to an arbitrary number of smart speakers at random speaker positions. This means that restrictions regarding the aesthetic positioning of the speakers are now a thing of the past.

upHear microphone processing with low-complexity AI

The AI based upHear Microphone Processing technology is designed to significantly improve the speech capturing capabilities of professional and consumer devices. 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 environments. Our advanced low-complexity AI-based noise reduction algorithm is deployable on edge devices and in the cloud and has low power consumption. At CES our visitors can experience the cutting-edge technology.

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 we will demonstrate xHE-AAC playback on the Xbox.

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

Also on display at CES will be LC3, the mandatory codec for the recently adopted Bluetooth Low Energy audio profiles and LC3plus, the codec that enhances the already excellent performance of LC3 by supporting best-in-class high resolution audio and lower delay modes down to 2.5 ms frame size, while providing additional robustness against packet loss. C3plus has recently been certified for the Hi-Res Audio Wireless Logo of the Japanese Audio Society. Come to our booth to hear the difference that LC3plus makes and see the first implementation of LC3plus into a high-resolution streaming system: the BeoLab 28 speakers by Bang & Olufsen.

If you want to read more about our demos, please visit the Fraunhofer IIS website. If you want to talk to our experts on the showfloor, make sure to schedule a meeting. We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas.

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