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Audyssey Targets Music-Streaming Services For Sound Enhancement

Los Angeles — Audyssey reports music-streaming apps will sound better through headphones connected to iOS and Android devices if the apps incorporate its new technology called AmpIT.

The new technology is a software developers kit (SDK), that enables music-streaming apps to optimize sound output for specific headphone models connected to a smartphone or tablet. The SDK also runs an audio-perception algorithm that maintains perceived bass response that would normally be lost at lower listening levels through headphones.

To optimize sound for a particular headphone pair, the app would access a Cloud-based database of headphone models. Data about each headphone’s acoustic characteristics, as measured by Audyssey, are stored in the Cloud and accessed by the app, whose menu would include different headphone models that users would select.

A total of 205 headphones from 55 headphone manufacturers are included in the database so far.

Audyssey also plans to expand its Cloud database to include the acoustic profiles of specific models of active wireless speakers (including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth models), docking speakers, soundbars, and embedded speakers in smartphones and tablets.

Announcements by suppliers in the speaker categories could be made by year’s end, said Chris Kyriakakis, Audyssey’s founder and chief technology officer.

Last month, the company announced availability of a 99-cent iOS media player app that uses the SDK to optimize the sound quality of music stored on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. The app, called Audyssey AMP (Audyssey Music Player), is meant mainly as a proof-of-concept “showcase,” Kyriakakis said.

Audyssey is also marketing the technology to headphone makers so they can offer their own iOS and Android apps to improve the sound quality of stored music played through their headphones.

“It’s typically thought that to get better audio quality, you have to increase bandwidth,” Kyriakakis said of music-streaming services. But “what we’ve found in our research is that bandwidth is not the leading cause of poor sound quality. It’s actually the acoustical problems of the playback devices.”

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