The world’s first range of DAB+ radios will be on show at the IBC Conference in Amsterdam this week. The company has told radioinfo it is “in final discussions with an Australian distributor” and the radio should soon be available in this country.
Market-leading DAB technology company, Frontier Silicon, and Fraunhofer IIS, worldwide experts in audio coding, have teamed up with tier one audio manufacturers to deliver the world’s first range of DAB+ radios.
Solutions incorporating Frontier Silicon’s multi-standard digital radio SoC Chorus 2 with Fraunhofer’s audio decoder IP are being designed into products from specialist brands including Bush, Grundig, Magicbox, Ministry of Sound, Pure, Revo, Tivoli and others, which will be available in shops by the end of this year.
Demonstrations of the latest digital radio receiving technology can be seen at the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam receiving a live DAB+ broadcast from Factum Electronics, but unlike previous engineering demonstrators, this will be the first time end-user DAB+ radios will be shown working.
Frontier Silicon’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Steve Evans has told radioinfo:
“As DAB+ is being adopted by an increasing number of broadcasters worldwide, we are pleased to announce that our DAB+ solution is being integrated into a variety of audio products, including table top, clock radio, battery powered and WiFi enabled radios. While DAB+ is not required for established markets such as the UK and Denmark, this development will help to accelerate the global adoption of digital radio.”
Manufacturers designing DAB+ radios today are using a variety of solutions from Frontier Silicon including the Chorus 2 chip, Venice 6 multistandard (DAB+/DAB/FM/WiFi) module, and the Jupiter 6 production-ready reference platform. The uniqueness of the Frontier Silicon DAB+ solution lies in its hardware-assisted DSP core architecture, which coupled with Fraunhofer’s efficient MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2 audio IP enables complex broadcast streams to be decoded while keeping power consumption low.
DAB (based on MPEG 1 layer II) is achieving great success in the UK and Denmark, with over 51⁄2 million units shipped to date and growing at a rate of 12% year on year in the UK alone. However, countries that have yet to roll out DAB are now looking to use DAB+ which utilizes the more efficient MPEG-4 HE AAC v2 codec, enabling a greater number of radio channels to be broadcast within a set radio spectrum.
Australia has officially committed to transmit DAB+ in 2009 and many other countries including Canada, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Malta, Israel, Hungary, Kuwait, Malaysia, and New Zealand are expected to follow suit soon.
Factum Electronics is a subsidiary of Effnet Holding AB, a world leader in the areas of DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), DAB+, DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and NICAM, digital stereo sound for television broadcasting.
Factum Electronics develops and sells system solutions for signal encoding, decoding and processing and serves professional broadcasting customers in more than 40 countries. Additionally Factum Electronics develops and sells middleware for receiver chip manufacturers and test & monitoring equipment.
For more information about the IBC conference see www.ibc.org.
For more info about Frontier Silicon, click the related link below.