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With the doors to MWC 2018 now officially open, the audio experts at THX have their own new products to reveal to the mobile world, starting with the THX Spatial Audio Platform. In fact, while no time and date information have been given, the company will be partnering with Qualcomm to showcase it over the course of the event which runs from February 26 through March 1. THX Spatial Audio is a new positional audio solution that supports current standard audio formats but also opens the doors for content creators to create more immersive experiences for just about anybody. That’s because it’s compartmentalized into various individual components that represent an end-to-end solution which also allows for object-based formats and ambisonics when taken together. Perhaps most importantly, however, the platform covers nearly the entire gamut of technologies where users might expect to find this type of high-fidelity audio, including mobile devices, PCs, and effectively any consumer electronics.
The THX Spatial Audio Platform is comprised of five primary components that each serve a unique purpose. The whole thing starts, as might be expected, with content creation. THX’s solution is built on plugins which can integrate smoothly into current industry-standard audio tools, rather than forcing audio designers to buy, learn, or work with new tools or formats. That’s backed by MPEG-H Encoding and Decoding, which is among the most recent of audio compression standards meant to bolster the efficiency of audio encoding, decoding, and transport. It serves as the backbone for delivery in conjunction with those plugins so that content can be streamed or broadcast. On the user end, that’s further supported by a dedicated rendering engine which pushes standard audio and spatializes ambisonic or object-based audio through output devices, whether that’s headphones or speakers. Of course, not every set of speakers or headset is the same, so THX built tuning and optimization into the platform, allowing THX Spatial Audio to calibrate playback for higher quality regardless of the listening device. The final component is personalization via Head-Related Transfer Functions that optimize the experience even further based on the hearing physics of the user.
This isn’t the first time THX has taken an interest in the mobile world but it appears to be differing from last time in that the company’s latest offering is a much more universal platform. With regard to the specifics of the demonstrations set for this Barcelona-based mobile event, the company says that every component of the THX Spatial Audio Platform will be on display.