Cutting Edge Sound Technologies for Consumer Electronics
3D-FYE™ 3D Surround Sound Technology
3D-FYE™ 3D Virtual Sound Technology for TVs, Video Gaming, Soundbars, Desktop Systems and Mobile Sound Docks
The home audio market shifts to soundbars. Today’s flat panel TVs sound much worse than their predecessors. They have become so thin that there is no space for speaker systems that can deliver high quality sound. This has driven many recent TV customers, people who were satisfied with the sound quality of their previous TVs, to purchase external audio systems.
Many of these consumers never owned multi-speaker surround sound systems and never will. For these customers, traditional surround sound systems have no appeal due to the effort and space required to install them. This combination of poorer sounding TVs and customers seeking compactness and easy installation has driven the demand for “soundbars”. Soundbars are all-in-one home theater systems that are short and wide, and designed to be placed directly below or above TV screens. They have become the fastest-growing segment of the home theater audio market.
But consumers and equipment reviewers are not completely satisfied with today’s soundbar products. Their biggest complaint is that they lack the ability to reproduce realistic, convincing, immersive sound. Consider, for instance, a soundbar with 3-channel surround sound decoding capability located below a TV, as shown in the figure below:
The resulting sound from this type of system appears to come straight from the speakers themselves. The left, center and right channel speakers are located close enough to each other that the sound “image” is small- only a slight improvement over “mono”. And the size of the sound image doesn’t improve when 2 or 3 speakers are used for each channel. With conventional technology, speakers located closely together will sound “narrow”.
Introducing “3D For Your Ears™” (3D-FYE™). Infinite Algorithms developed powerful new technology that produces realistic, convincing, immersive sound from a thin, compact soundbar. With 3D-FYE, the sound “image” is large and wide, as illustrated below:
Size of the sound “image” from a 3D-FYE soundbar
3D-FYE transforms a TV room into a theater with sound appearing to come from a much larger, wider area, as shown in red. Moreover, this high-quality virtual sound can be experienced within a large area of the TV room. This "sweet spot" is nearly the entire room, with walls behaving as though they contain hidden speakers. Looking from the top, the virtual speakers cover the entire space from left to right, and can be enjoyed by people on the sofa, sitting or standing near it, or even walking around the room:
There are four other advantages to 3D-FYE technology:
- It uses power efficiently, avoiding the typical sound wave cancellations that reduce the acoustic energy in the room.
- The sound is of high "audiophile" quality- smooth and natural with no noise, distortion, hollowness or harshness.
- It is not sensitive to room décor, room shape, or the orientation and positioning of the soundbar in the room.
- It does not require complex user calibration or setup procedures.
So where is the magic?
Just as a 3D TV produces a "right eye image" and "left eye image" to create an illusion of depth, 3D-FYE creates an audio illusion of a large, wide, immersive space. The technology uses psychoacoustic cues to create "left ear" and "right ear" sound waves that provide the illusion of sounds appearing from a wide range of horizontal and vertical angles and depths:
This illusion is robust and stable, and can be clearly felt throughout most of the room. There is a perception of clear, well-defined "left" and "right" sound spaces, as well as a sense of "height". Imagine a 3D TV image that also included your peripheral vision- this is the 3D-FYE experience. Needless to say, this technology is an ideal companion to the emerging 3D TV and video game markets.
Applications
Applications for the new 3D-FYE technology span from 3DTV to all other audio systems found in home.
People are talking
"I can actually feel the different areas the sound is coming from, from each of the instruments, just as if there is a whole orchestra right in front of me, and it is coming from one soundbar....It feels like I'm in Symphony Hall, where the acoustics are absolutely perfect...."
— Cindy Davis, Editor-in-Chief, TechDecisions