Old speakers? Try giving your music digital boost
An audio engineer touts a new way of using digital signal processing, and promises it can make high-quality sound come out of low-quality speakers.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published December 11, 2006
Veteran audio engineer Tony Bongiovi, who once worked with Jimi Hendrix, says he has been disappointed for decades that the equipment most people used to listen to music couldn't replicate the high-quality sound heard in the studio.
Now, he says he's created an answer: a technique for sound processing that made its debut in a JVC car stereo last week.
"Speakers are such a primitive device, but with digital technology we can overcome that," Bongiovi said. (If his name sounds familiar to those who know music but nothing of audio engineering, it's because his second cousin is Jon Bon Jovi.)
The technique - which Bongiovi calls the Digital Power Station for the studio he once built in a converted power station in Manhattan - can be described as a very sophisticated equalizer. It adapts intelligently to the music to give even cheap speakers a full, robust sound and compensate for the deficiencies of the listening space.
This is accomplished by digital signal processing, a technology found in virtually all consumer audio products. But, Bongiovi says, it has never been employed in this way.
Bongiovi and his company, Bongiovi Acoustics of Port St. Lucie, first built a device using analog components to produce the effect, but the unit was the size of a refrigerator. He turned to Glenn Zelniker, a specialist in digital signal processing, to program a chip to do the same thing.
"The technique really allows the sound source to be heard very well, loud and clear and intelligible in a very, very compromised sonic environment," Zelniker said.
The chip, an off-the-shelf digital signal processor from Motorola spinoff Freescale Semiconductor Inc., is programmed specifically for each car model, taking into account the characteristics of its speakers and interior. It has more than 120 points of adjustment.
"It's so precise that the hatchback Ford Focus has a different tuning from the regular one," Bongiovi said.
In a demonstration for a reporter in a Ford Focus with standard speakers, the JVC KD-S100 car stereo produced radically different sound quality with the Digital Power Station chip engaged. The sound swelled to give an impression of space, and all instruments came through more clearly.
The bass was rich and free of distortion, a phenomenon Bongiovi attributes both to the chip knowing exactly how much the four speakers can take, and to synchronizing them to act as one "virtual subwoofer."
The stereo will cost $700 to $1,000 installed, depending on the make of the car, and will be available only at dealers, since the chip requires programming (via a CD) to match the make of the car.
While the technology is particularly suited to a noisy environment like a car, Bongiovi said he sees it as having much wider applications, though there are no specific plans for taking the chip to consumer gadgets beyond the car stereo.