Audio News for May 26, 2007

Possible International Solution to Webcasters’ Licensing Fees Dilemma – The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) promotes the recording industry worldwide and has membership of over 1400 companies in more than 70 countries. It says it has made a major forward step in the cross-border music licensing regime. Two agreements have been reached between the IFPI and record company collecting societies to make it easier for Webcasters to pay for licenses to stream music across various territories – taken for granted with Internet accessibility. The agreements create the framework licensing producers’ rights for various streaming and podcast services. The IFPI says, “It is expected that more than 40 collecting societies, covering most of the key music markets worldwide, will sign up to these two agreements.”…”We want consumers to be able to listen to our music anywhere, any time, through any device, as long as it is legal.”

Perfected 5.1 Headphone System Introduced by Beyer – Beyerdynamic Headphones demonstrated at the recent Munich High End Society Show their new Headzone technology, which uses head tracking in order to produce completely convincing 5.1 speaker surround sound via headphones. Originally created for recording professionals, the system processes the signals from multichannel sources to achieve a perfect room simulation via headphones, even if the user moves his head – and thus is similar to the sensation of moving one’s head in room with loudspeakers.

SRS Virtual Surround and Ambient Sound Technologies in Flat Panel TVs – Audio and voice technology provider SRS Labs Inc. has announced that its technologies are now used in 38% of the 58 million flat panel TVs sold worldwide, and that at least one of their several technologies are implemented by seven of the top nine FPTV manufacturers.  The two main SRS products used are first TruSurround XT, which processes multichannel audio content to create a virtual surround experience thru stereo speakers in the TV, thus saving the complexity and cost of a multi-speaker configuration. The second technology is SRS WOW, which creates a larger sweet spot, provides bass enhancement, and retrieves ambient information in the audio that is typically lost during the recording and playback process. WOW has been included with every Windows Media Player since the year 2000. Other SRS audio technologies for the TV market include SRS 3D enhancement of mono or stereo sources, TruSurround HD and HD4 – the next generations in the series – for rendering surround sound from speaker setups including 2.0, 3.1 and 4.0, SRS TruBass for psychoacoustic bass enhancement, and SRS Focus for vertical repositioning of the audio image.