(December 14, 2023) Auro-3D has announced its plans for the forthcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. The immersive audio specialist says it will demonstrate its next-gen codec, AURO-CX, which promises to elevate streaming and broadcast TV audio.
According to Auro, AURO-CX is scalable, which is advantageous to content creators, distributors, streaming services, and manufacturers. How? A variety of audio resolutions—from lossless to transparent to lossy—are included within a single bitstream thanks to multiple audio waveform coding techniques. It also has scalable sample rates that allow a single bitstream to carry 48, 96, and 192kHz, allowing a decoder to extract only what it needs from a single encode, depending on its capabilities.
Ultimately, working with the codec requires less storage space and fewer encoding passes, both of which save considerable time, manpower, and costs as compared to other modern encoding options.
“Thanks to AURO-CX’s scalable quality, content distributors have the flexibility to address multiple audiences using the same stream. A single stream can include high-res immersive audio for the audiophile community and lower bitrate mixes for a wider consumer audience,” says Bert Van Daele, CTO of NEWAURO B.V. “Because AURO-CX is scalable, it is attractive to streaming services, which can make a single stream upgradeable for premium services. This is a powerful technology.”
AURO-CX also has the flexibility to transmit objects embedded in the same bitstream for immersive audio. “Other formats have to extract objects from 7.1, resulting in a big reduction in audio quality, especially for the height channels in an immersive audio setup,” says Van Daele. “AURO does it differently. We embed objects in 13.1 immersive so that the user’s 7.1 experience is more 3D due to higher-quality height information, allowing the mix to stay true to the artist’s intent and deliver to the end user what was heard in the studio.”
In addition, AURO-CX supports a wide range of flexible broadcast features, such as dialogue enhancement and localized audio for multiple languages. It also enables interactive and assistive audio, where the quality of the immersive experience can be set higher than the additional audio tracks, guaranteeing the best immersive experience while providing better access to all.
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