Audio News for April 8, 2008

Survey of  Use of Computer Audio – The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) conducted a Computer-Sourced Audio Consumption Study last year.  They found about 35% of computer audio consumers are now viewing movies and TV on their PCs and Macs an average of over 7 hours a week, and 77% are listening to music for about 9 hours a week on their computers. The study found that the majority of such computer audio listeners use external speakers, but few of them are high quality audiophile speaker systems and only 9% of the external speaker users have a surround configuration of four or more separate speakers.  Though an increasing number of people are beginning to enjoy movies, TV and music via their computers, most of them don’t want to set up a traditional 5.1 speaker system for surround sound. Therefore the various pseudo-surround software and hardware solutions are gaining favor, to create phantom speaker locations around the room from a basic 2.0 or 2.1 speaker system. And as media extenders such as AppleTV improve and come down in cost, it will become easier to extend both video and surround audio wirelessly from a computer anywhere in the house to one’s higher-quality home AV system.

UPnP – What Is It? – Universal Plug ‘n Play (UPnP) is an electronic architecture which offers peer-to-peer network connectivity of computers, intelligent appliances and wireless devices.  It is a distributed, open networking architecture leveraging PCT/IP and the  Internet to enable seamless proximity networking and control and data transfer among networked devices wherever they are. Nearly 900 vendors are now members of the UPnP Forum, including industry leaders in computing, printing, networking, consumer electronics, home appliances, automation, control, security and mobile products.  Their intent is provide the public easily-connected devices and to simplify the implementation of networked devices, to allow devices to connect up seamlessly, and to develop an overall system which supports these UPnP devices.

Some of the benefits of UPnP technology are that it can run on any network setup: Wi-Fi, Airport, phone line, powerline, Ethernet or 1394 Firewire. Any computer operating system or programming language can be used.  The vendor has control over the device user interface and interaction using the browser, and value-added services can be layered on top of the basic device by the individual manufacturers.  The goal of UPnP technology is to make the current connectivity morass affecting consumer electronics and convergence into a much more user-friendly environment.