May 25, 2006 Better Sound in Small Packages By MICHEL MARRIOTT NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/technology/25sound.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print Not long ago, Pamela Henning, an executive at a New York-based film company, listened to her music over an expensive stereo system loaded with 2,000 of her favorite CD's. But, she said recently, it was a bit too much to handle. She bought a five-CD changer, later replaced with a single-CD player. Eventually, she chucked it all. "I found the old-world technology so time-consuming," said Ms. Henning, senior vice president for integrated marketing for the Weinstein Company. She decided to transfer all of her music, from Shirley Bassey to Trane, onto Apple iPods, and then back up the iPods on a hard drive, backed up by a second hard drive. Finally, her music was portable and quickly accessible. And when she wanted to listen in her Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, she often snapped one of her four iPods into a stereo docking system. There was just one drawback, she noted: the musical experience was not as rich as the one her old stereo provided. With the popularity of iPods and other hand-held digital music players 140 million were sold worldwide last year many consumers have made a similar compromise, trading music fidelity for portability. The era of big-box home loudspeakers with broad-shouldered stereo amplifiers and their full-bodied sound has been overtaken by microchip-driven miniaturization and home theater systems that tend to be optimized for listening to movies, not music. "The thing that has changed is the consumers' perspective of what they expect from audio," said Dweezil Zappa, the 36-year-old musician who is performing the music of his late father, Frank Zappa, for new audiences. "I think younger consumers aren't familiar at all with really high-quality audio because for them a CD is the best thing they have ever heard." But innovation is restless, suggested Mahesh Sundaram, vice president for marketing for Audistry, an Australian-based audio company established early this year as a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories. He said technologies that helped put consumers' music at their fingertips could also be used to make that music sound much better than what many have grown accustomed to. "Their reference point is going to shift dramatically," he noted. The goal, many audio experts say, is to improve sound quality both on portable devices and in the living room. The methods are taking different paths. In some instances, digital technologies are being applied to a new crop of audio components, including speakers, headphones and portable music players, to enhance existing audio recordings. Other approaches include attempts to create richer, fuller recordings in studios and in live performances. Major audio electronics companies like Creative and SRS Labs, along with Audistry, are increasingly turning to psychoacoustic technologies, which manipulate sound waves to convince listeners that they are hearing much more than they actually are. Others, like the chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, are investing in supporting PC-like platforms to help musicians, recording studio engineers and producers to capture, store and mix music more accurately. Charlie Boswell, director of Advanced Micro's digital media and entertainment group in Austin, Tex., said the goal was recordings that sound vastly better and computer-driven technologies that do not get in the way of the artistic process. For example, equipment using Advanced Micro's latest dual Opteron processor was used last month in New York to record the Jammys, an awards event honoring live music performances. Mr. Boswell said the program, which included, among others, Peter Frampton, Dweezil Zappa and Richie Havens, would be available in the fall on a special 5.1 surround-sound DVD (using five speakers and a subwoofer). The DVD, as well as a series of others made with Advanced Micro chips, can be played in any DVD player but is best appreciated on higher-end music and home-theater systems, offering nuances, warmth and dynamics often not found in live recordings, whether on CD or vinyl, Mr. Boswell said. Frank Filipetti, a Grammy-winning studio engineer and producer, said he was so impressed with the audio possibilities of DVD's that he is pushing for the recording industry to use them exclusively and phase out CD's. DVD's have enough storage capacity for an album's worth of uncompressed music on them; CD's require compression, though not as much as MP3's and other formats read by digital audio players. "Why shouldn't the listener at home hear what I hear in here?" Mr. Filipetti said during an interview in a Midtown Manhattan studio while playing back a Frank Zappa track he was readying for a new collection. But companies that work mostly with compressed music say much can still be done to make it sound better. "We are trying to add back a layer of quality, a layer of experience that people don't realize that they are missing," said Chris Bennett, president of Audistry. One of his company's offerings is a "sound space expander." Its purpose, Mr. Bennett said, is to convince listeners that music played from speakers that have very little physical separation from one another, as in portable stereos and many music docking stations, sound as if they do. By using a series of proprietary algorithms that will run on the system's microprocessors, Audistry technologies create an impression that the sound is being heard from widely separated speakers, Mr. Bennett said. At the same time, the technology creates what Audistry calls a "wide stereo image," meaning the space between the music's instruments also seems to widen without distorting vocals at the center of the mix. Some of the first consumer products using Audistry audio enhancements are going on sale in the United States this month. Among them is the SD-SP10, a 2.1 home audio-video system by Sharp Electronics. The system will cost $350, said Sharp said. Similarly, Creative Technology, the Singapore-based digital audio pioneer, is turning attention to improving sound quality in consumer products, said Steve Erickson, general manager and vice president for Creative audio products. Last year, Creative released its Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity processor, which is armed with 51 million transistors and is 24 times as powerful as the company's previous audio chip, Mr. Erickson said. A number of versions of the sound card with varying abilities are available for use in PC's, ranging in price from $130 to $400. But this year Creative's audio enhancement technologies are migrating to a broader range of applications and products. For example, aspects of its digital signal processing abilities could be applied to stereo headphones to create a more natural three-dimensional sound than current headphones can, Mr. Erickson said. SRS Labs, with its headquarters in Santa Ana, Calif., offers what David Frerichs, the company's executive vice president for strategic marketing and corporate development, calls a "whole eco-system of things we do to leverage our experience" with high-quality audio technologies. One of the company's newest advances is SRS Mobile HD, designed for digital broadcast and downloads. The technology also enables headphones made for mobile phones and portable media devices to play audio in 5.1 surround sound. SRS said the technology was so new that it had not yet been licensed to any manufacturers. But one of its similar technologies, called SRS WOW HD, is integrated into a number of consumer products, including a range of MP3 players by Samsung and Alienware. Like many consumers, Ms. Henning, the film company executive, said she was not overly concerned with the details. She only wants to get the best sound she can with the ease of pressing a button. Mr. Bennett of Audistry said he was confident that the electronics industry could deliver on that. But he cautioned that consumers should listen not just to claims, but to the approaching waves of improved audio. "Nothing," he said, "speaks louder than someone hearing it themselves." ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list medianews@twiar.org To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
