Austriamicrosystems Announces Hi-Fi Audio Player For New Music Phones
Austriamicrosystems has announced a new High Definition audio player with low power requirements for the next wave of music cell phones. austriamicrosystems unveiled the first member of a new family of media players aimed at bridging the gap between the audio experience of music phones and Hi-Fi home audio devices.
The new music player subsystem, dubbed AS3532, is based on a newly developed audio engine and audio post-processor which act as co-processors to an ARM central programmable unit. The audio engine, in a fully hardwired context, executes the decompression and playback of most popular compressed audio formats, like MP3, WMA and AAC for the least amount of power consumption with zero CPU load.
The audio post-processor implements an Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter (ASRC) with near transparent quality, a multi-channel mixer with limiting function and a 10 bands graphics equalizer and supports 192 KHz sample rates at 24 bits dynamic range for high definition audio processing. Three sets of I2S outputs can independently control stereo speakers, subwoofer and headphone or line outputs; these can also be utilized as multi-channel audio outputs. The AS3532 audio subsystem additionally includes a stereo PDM digital microphone input thereby completing all audio requirements for new generation mobile phones.
An on-chip 512Kbytes buffer memory in the AS3532 music player IC allows single chip support of all key audio formats, compressed, lossless and high definition, polyphonic sequenced content, wavetable synthesizer, 3D positional sound, virtualizer engines and other digital audio effects.
The lingering question is why all the horsepower if practically all consumers are going to just play lossy MP3 files?
