AURO-3D will showcase AURO-CX its Next Generation Audio codec, during CES 2024, January 9–12 at The Venetian Hotel.
The AURO-CX Codec, designed for streaming but with applications in broadcast, has many advantages over existing Next Generation Audio codecs that make it desirable to the universe of content creators, content distributors, streaming services, and audio manufacturers, according to the company. All these advantages are rooted in the codec’s inherent scalability, which means less storage space and fewer encoding passes, both of which save considerable time, manpower, and costs.
“Thanks to AURO-CX’s scalable quality, content distributors have the flexibility to address multiple audiences using the same stream. A single stream can include high-res immersive audio for the audiophile community and lower bitrate mixes for a wider consumer audience,” says Bert Van Daele, CTO of NEWAURO B.V. “Because AURO-CX is scalable, it is attractive to streaming services, which can make a single stream upgradeable for premium services. This is a powerful technology.”
The company boasts that perhaps most notable is that AURO-CX enables scalable quality, meaning a variety of resolutions—from lossless to transparent to lossy—are included within a single bitstream thanks to multiple audio waveform coding techniques. Similarly, AURO-CX has scalable sample rates that allow a single bitstream to carry 48, 96, and 192kHz, giving the decoder the option to extract only what it needs from a single encode, depending on its capabilities.
AURO-CX also has the flexibility to transmit objects embedded in the same bitstream for immersive audio.
“Other formats have to extract objects from 7.1, resulting in a big reduction in audio quality, especially for the height channels in an immersive audio setup,” comments Van Daele. “AURO does it differently. We embed objects in 13.1 immersive so that the user’s 7.1 experience is more 3D due to higher-quality height information, allowing the mix to stay true to the artist’s intent and deliver to the end user what was heard in the studio.”
In addition, AURO-CX supports a wide range of flexible broadcast features such as dialogue enhancement and localized audio for multiple languages. It also enables interactive and assistive audio, where the quality of the immersive experience can be set higher than the additional audio tracks, guaranteeing the best immersive experience while providing better access to all.
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