Swedish sound pioneer Dirac and NXP® Semiconductors today announced a collaboration to combine one of the world’s most powerful audio chipsets with a market-leading digital audio platform. By equipping the NXP i.MX 8M family of chipsets with Dirac’s digital audio platform, OEMs can enable their devices with maximized, immersive, and adaptive sound across their complete range of products. This announcement is being made at CES 2020 at Dirac Booth #18123.
The Dirac digital audio platform includes both Dirac digital audio solutions and the Dirac suite of tuning tools. The Dirac digital audio solutions are selected by the OEM to customize the product’s sound experience while the tuning tools both ensure consistent sound quality across the entire product line and allow the OEM to adjust the sound experience based on brand preferences.
The Dirac-enabled NXP chipsets are ideally suited to a new generation of smart speakers and soundbars that increasingly prioritize high-quality sound, in addition to home theater receivers, automobiles, and more.
“NXP has strong relationships with category-leading brands in some of the most dynamic consumer market segments,” stated Mathias Johansson, Dirac’s co-founder and CEO. “By teaming up with NXP, Dirac has accelerated its growth in the smart speaker and soundbar channels and is now uniquely positioned to redefine these growing markets by enabling smaller products with a level of sound that could once only be delivered through much larger devices.”
Through this collaboration, manufacturers stand to accelerate their product’s time-to-market; complete product lines can be easily outfitted with the market’s best sound experience, which can then be customized using Dirac’s tuning tools to fit their brand style and ensure consistency – all without the OEM developing any of its own software or writing its own code.
“The consumer market is demanding higher quality audio across the entire product spectrum, including smart speakers and soundbars,” said Martyn Humphries, vice president, and general manager, i.MX applications processor for consumer and industrial for NXP. “Collaborating with Dirac allows NXP to offer an advanced audio solution that meets the industry’s rising standards and makes it much easier for our manufacturer customers to enable their products with a premium sound experience, without adding any development costs.”
When customizing their chipset, manufacturers can choose from a variety of Dirac solutions, such as speaker optimization, bass management, bass enhancement, room correction, and immersive audio solutions. The patented algorithms are accessed and enabled through Dirac’s market-leading tuning tools.
The new NXP chipset brings Dirac quality to mass-market products while offering manufacturers unprecedented flexibility to develop distinct families of audio products. Dirac’s digital audio platform is enabled through the Immerse3D audio framework from NXP.
