Meeting audio needs – SPONSORED TUTORIAL

Car audio system designers face an extraordinary range of challenges: their products need to function in harsh and exacting environments and some elements may also be safety sensitive. There are the usual constraints on weight and physical size, sharpened by a focus on energy efficiency, and the less familiar pressures of shorter design cycles and rapidly changing feature demands. Audio designers need to provide a genuine ‘multimedia’ experience. A vehicle audio system needs to integrate inputs from – and provide control over – entertainment sources such as CDs, SD and Mini-SD cards, USB sticks and MP3 players. It must also manage key operations, such as RDS traffic reports and outputs from driver information and safety equipment. As well as interfacing with a variety of sources, the audio system is likely to have to deal with an equal variety of file handling, decoding and decryption tasks. MP3, AAC, WMA and ATRAC decoders are expected: and managing the complex support for digital rights management (DRM) formats such as Microsoft DRM10 and Apple’s ‘Fair Play’ is by no means trivial. Support of popular playlist formats such as .m3U, .pls, .asx and .wpl, along with the likes of WinAmp and WM Player, is also a consideration. Such are the time to market and budgetary pressures that many of these capabilities need to be retro fitted quickly and at minimum cost. Consumers are becoming used to carrying their music collection with them and expect to do this in their vehicles. As new appliances are launched and become more common, this trend is likely to continue.