Another dot connecting article.
Internet audio players face format clamor
By By Will Wade
EE Times
(11/18/99, 3:25 p.m. EDT)
LAS VEGAS ? S3 Inc. demonstrated at Comdex/Fall this week the next generation of Rio digital audio player with a new compression format, Windows Media Audio (WMA) backed by Microsoft Corp. The existing Rio, developed by Diamond Multimedia, which S3 acquired earlier this year, uses the popular MP3 audio format. The change focuses attention on a hot market in which no single codec or security scheme has emerged as dominant.
Separately, Cirrus Logic Inc. (Fremont, Calif.) announced a deal at Comdex to incorporate the encryption software of InterTrust Technologies Corp. into Cirrus' line of Maverick digital audio processors, which were rolled out this past summer. The company is also revamping the Maverick chips to support MP3, WMA and several other audio format contenders. Chips should sample next quarter and ramp to volume production in the first half of next year.
Also, Sony Corp. will support WMA in future Web audio players in addition to its proprietary codec. S3's current Rio lineup is based on fixed-function digital signal processors from Micronas, and can only work with the MP3 decompression format. This scheme, which has catapulted digital audio from the realm of techno-hobbyists, is an old format with no provisions for encryption or other security, a flaw that is keeping most mainstream music corporations from placing extensive catalogs on the Internet for easy download. The recording industry fears that the lack of security will give rise to rampant piracy.
WMA is just one of several decompression technologies that promise to relieve that problem and open the floodgates for digital music as a mass consumer market. Some chip makers are now working to enhance their product lines to support such formats and to allow encryption.
Cirrus' Maverick line is based on a licensed ARM 720T processor core. Joe Maurin, director of business development for the company's embedded-processor division, touts the advantages of a microprocessor-based device over one using DSP technology.
"A general-purpose processor is much easier to program than a DSP, so it costs us less to configure our chips for any decompression format," Maurin said. This also means faster time-to-market, he said, as well as lower power consumption. "While we'll always admit that a DSP can do a better job, it will probably be more expensive and less flexible," said Maurin.
Format flexibility
Not so, countered Randy Cole, digital audio manager of Texas Instruments Inc.'s media technologies laboratory (Dallas). TI has been promoting its venerable C54x chips for the digital audio player market since last year, and several systems using them are available now. Cole discounted the notion that a programmable DSP is more complicated to turn out for this market than an MPU, and said TI's chips are comparable in price to the Cirrus products. Both are in the $12 to $15 range.
"What we've got is programmability and flexibility, so we won't be dead in the water the next time a new format comes out," said Cole. "I think there is room for all the formats we are seeing today, but I don't think in the end there will be just one."
The MP3 format represents about 90 percent of the music currently available in digital form, but since it does not have strong backing from the major record labels, the vast majority of tunes will remain on CDs instead of the Internet. Besides WMA, other contending compression formats are backed by Dolby Labs and Lucent Technologies. Along with encryption, they offer increased speed, which means faster downloads and higher-quality sound.
However, if the format runs too fast it runs the risk of overloading an analog modem connection to the Internet, which maxes out at 56 kbits/second, but generally runs in the 30- to 40-kbit/s range. Like most speculators in the cybereconomy, Internet audio players are anxiously awaiting the arrival of broadband consumer Internet access, which will make speed questions moot and likely change the way people utilize the technology.
Despite the still-unsettled technology issues, "I think digital audio players could be one of the biggest sellers this Christmas," said Jim Cady, president of S3's communications division. "We can't even meet all the demand we are seeing. This technology completely changes everything about the way people listen to music."
Cady expects players to ship in the hundreds of thousands of units this year, and said S3 is projecting shipments of millions of the pager-size systems next year. Besides personal stereos, he also sees digital audio moving into automobiles, home stereos, set-top boxes, cell phones, PDAs and other consumer devices.
TI's Cole said his research shows the personal players could sell up to a million units in 1999, swelling to 5 million next year and 10 million in 2001. "We wouldn't be in this market if we didn't think there was a lot of money
to be made." |
